


Let Me Count the Ways

by collectsfallenstars



Category: The King: Eternal Monarch RPF, 더 킹：영원의 군주 | The King: Eternal Monarch (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24769945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/collectsfallenstars/pseuds/collectsfallenstars
Summary: Life imitates art as Lee Minho and Kim Goeun find themselves falling for each other despite the risks while their characters in the drama The King: Eternal Monarch fight fate to stay together.  They count the ways and degrees of their fall with every look, touch, distance breached, hug, kiss, and "I love you's."
Relationships: Jeong Tae Eul/Lee Gon, Lee Minho/Kim Goeun
Comments: 170
Kudos: 470





	1. The First Time They Saw Each Other, Really Saw Each Other

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lee MinHo and Kim GoEun were two seats from each other at the BIFAN Awards 2015 and had no idea that four years later, they would play lovers in "The King: Eternal Monarch" and be closer than ever.

The first time he saw her at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in 2015, he didn't even recognize her. Stage lights and camera flashes had turned her sleek white dress almost into a sunbeam and he found it hard to look. But then he also found it hard not to look as her left leg peeked through an almost dangerous but still tasteful slit up her thigh as she walked to her seat. She moved with an almost easy sensuality, as if she wasn't even aware of it, and it contrasted so much with the bashful way she kept her eyes on the ground, bowing slightly to every person she passed by. He remembered clocking her as, "Cute. Must be a new actress, " and then turning to speak to the person who had tapped on him on his right shoulder. She had ended up sitting two seats away from him. And that was that.

Halfway through the awards show, he was startled almost out of his seat when they announced Kim GoEun as the recipient of the Special Mention for the Best Actress Category for "Chinatown", and the girl he had marked as "cute new actress" started getting up from her seat. He had seen "Chinatown" with his friends a few months ago and he could clearly remember the young teenager who had played the feral little debt collector/killer. Her performance had looked so effortlessly intuitive and he could clearly recall how he even told one of his friends that the kid was going to go places someday.

He leaned forward, turned his head and tried to stare at her as discreetly as possible. He couldn't comprehend how she had gone from that little ragamuffin in "Chinatown" to this beautiful young woman. As an actor, he should have been used the transformation that actors and actresses go through when occupying a role but hers was just extraordinary. He was at awe and just a little bit intimidated with what she had achieved in such a short time. He made a mental note to look up her work and watch them in his off time.

People around them had started congratulating her and he could see a little flush creeping sweetly up her round cheeks. And when she glanced over at his direction, her eyes met his briefly and he had smiled at her, trying wordlessly to convey how amazing he thought she was in her movie. But then she had quickly looked away and smiled at the ground. It was almost endearing how she had tucked errant strands of her hair behind her ear before gathering her dress so she could walk up to the stage.

He could also, very clearly, remember the flash of heat that ran up his spine when she had turned to face the stage and he saw the back of her dress. There was none. Well, there was, but it looked like someone had cut it out to make way for her angel wings. The delicate line of her spine was exposed, flanked on both sides by her shoulder blades where her angel wings could have been and it continued down her back until the sweet curve of the bottom of her spine had thankfully disappeared back under fabric once more. He swallowed hard, crossed his legs, and attributed the heat to the stage lights.

So 4 years later when his sister had told him that after his military service, he was going to be at the helm of a Kim EunSook drama with Kim GoEun as his leading lady, his entire being had buzzed with electricity. EunGyo. HongYi. IlYoung. Hong Seol. Ji EunTak. He had seen them all and he wondered what it would be like to see all those characters collapsed into a single existence when he meets her again, for the first time.

The first time she saw him, she didn't see him at all. Back in college after finishing "Eungyo," she was just a normal student enjoying normal everyday things like going out for barbecue, chicken, beer, movies, and the occasional tv drama. "The Heirs" had created such a huge buzz in 2013 that she had felt compelled to watch it.

And that's when she saw him, Kim Tan, golden and glorious under the California sun on the opening credits of "The Heirs." It was almost embarrassing how quickly her face had heated up after only a few seconds of watching him surf. She had always loved the beach, that was for sure. But she had never seen Kim Tan on a surfboard in the beaches she had gone to. Droplets of ocean water hanging from the tips of hair falling over his forehead, eyelashes, nose and lips were all it took for Kim GoEun to understand why Lee Minho was in a league all on his own when it came to star quality.

But he was never Lee MinHo to her. He was Kim Tan, the California surfer. Kim Tan, the lonely misunderstood heir who would fight to the bitter end to keep his love. Kim Tan, who stole kisses with a donut. Kim Tan, who opens his arms wide and closes them around his girl and makes her feel like no one else in the world mattered. He was, quite possibly, the biggest crush of her entire young life.

So when only a few years later at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in 2015, she had been seated two people away from him, she hadn't known what to do with herself. She knows she was there for two awards but she can only remember staring at the floor and trying very hard not to look over to her right because her Kim Tan was there. She was there as an actress so she should at least try to act like one and not some tween with a big crush. And she had been good, managing to avoid openly staring at him by avoiding eye contact with absolutely everyone.

But when they called her name onstage and everyone around her had started to congratulate her, it had been impossible not to look. She chanced a glance at him when someone on her right side had murmured congratulations. She could swear their eyes met for the briefest of moments but she couldn't be too sure. She had felt her face heating up from embarrassment and had to turn away before he could notice. Not that he would actually be looking at her but mostly for her own dignity and self-preservation.

She doesn't remember how she got up the stage but she did. She was proud of the work she had done, she was. Four movies as a main character was no easy feat. But this night will forever remain in her mind as the night she first saw Kim Tan.

But the first time she met Lee Minho was a different story altogether.

She was older at 29 years old, no longer the blushing college girl who was unsure as to what path to take. She had thrown herself into acting, embracing her path at full throttle because if there was one thing that the passing of her beloved grandmother had taught her, it was that she only had one life to live. So when she had been offered the unconventional role of Lt. Jeong TaeEul, a blunt, pragmatic detective who falls in love with a monarch from a parallel universe, she didn't even think twice before saying yes to Kim EunSook, the woman who had given her the bright loving light of Ji EunTak. And when she was told that the monarch she would fall in love with was Lee MinHo, she merely threw her head back and laughed heartily, remembering the silliness of her early years in the business. She was different now.

And so, when the main cast had gathered together in Kim EunSook's office on day in July of 2019 and she had taken the opportunity to get to know them a little bit. She knew she was going to miss the first Table Reading as she had not yet wrapped up with the filming of her musical, "Hero." It had been easy to spot his tall handsome form, even from the corner of the room.

"Sunbaenim!" she cried as she rushed over to him, bowing and shaking his hand while smiling brightly up at him. "Kim Tan the handsome heir, I finally meet you! I had the biggest crush on Kim Tan when I was 22! I'm your fan! Thank you for making my dream come true!" Then she gave him two thumbs up and started shaking them near her face.

Lee MinHo had burst out laughing at her dorky but nonetheless adorable introduction. He had a strange laugh, Goeun thought, but liked the sound of it anyway. It was the kind of laughter that started in the belly and knocked around in the chest, his whole body shaking in an effort to contain it. She liked his kind of laughter, she decided as she craned her head up to look at him.

When his laughter had subsided, his hand went up to wipe some of the tears that had formed in the corners of his eyes and caught the edge of the black baseball cap she had worn that day. It tumbled out of her head and fell to the floor. But before she could even bend to pick it up, he touched her gently on the shoulder and shook his head a little. Then he crouched low, swiftly snatched her black ball cap from the ground and got up.

She held her hands out to receive it but to her surprise, he brushed off whatever dirt it caught from the floor and placed her ball cap back on her head. It slid on easily but she could still feel how his hands made sure it was snug. Then he placed his hands on her shoulders, bent a little to look at his handiwork. She found herself turning her face up to let him see it was okay. He really, really had the most beautiful pair of deep-set brown eyes. Seeing them up close caused a little riot in her but she held it together.

Then he caught a few strands of her hair that was flattened against the left side of her face and smoothed it behind the delicate shell of her ear.

"There, perfect."

Then, a megawatt smile.

And 29 year old Kim GoEun felt like someone had tugged her heart back into her 22 year old self.

"Ah, I'm afraid the Kim Tan you know is old now," he said ruefully, his eyes holding a little bit of his earlier laughter. "I don't think it's your dream that came true though. I believe it was mine, Goeunssi. I have wanted to work with your for a long time now."

With great effort, she tugged her heart back to her 29 year old self and forced her pulse to stop ringing in her ears. She had prepared for her role as thoroughly as she always did. But she hadn't prepared for this, for him being like...this. How did his co-stars not fall at his feet all the time? No one had warned her that he would be this effortlessly magnetic. How was she going to last 7 or 8 months of the onslaught of his charm without making a fool of herself?

She smiled back at him, told him, insisted actually, that it really was more her dream that came true. But in her head, she ran a mantra that would be her armor for the long months to come, "A smile is just a smile. It does not mean more. Do not want more." With that, she gave one last bow to him and flitted off to Woo DoHwan. And that was the last that Lee Minho would see of Kim GoEun for the next few months.

It was October when he finally saw her again.

He had arrived at the set a good 30 minutes before shooting began. It was a booth tucked away in one corner of a BBQ Chicken branch, right against a glass wall. He took his seat and tried to settle his racing mind. On hindsight, it had probably not been a good idea to marathon all her movies and her two dramas before this first shoot. Watching Kim GoEun's growth on film and tv had only driven home the point that she was out of his league.

He had never been an insecure actor. He just knew his strengths and used them to his advantage. He also knew what he lacked and had tried his hardest to make up for them. And if he couldn't, he would avoid putting himself in a situation where he would be forced to show a weak hand. But after watching Kim GoEun work with legends like Lee ByungHun, Jeon DoYeon, Kim HyeSoo, and Gong Yoo, he had come to the conclusion that he had absolutely nothing to offer her that she hadn't gotten before from all the other actors she had worked with.

So he sat there in BBQ Chicken, fiddling with his thumbs in trepidation. And then, almost as if by gravity, his head turned to the side and through the glass wall, he saw her white van roll to a stop out on the street. She stepped out, her gait light. She had been made to wear outfits that seemed to swallow her up, tennis shoes, baggy jeans, loose fitting black polo shirt, and topped by a long moss green winter coat.

But for all her character's visual heaviness, her delicate round face looked lit from the inside with the light of a thousands stars. He had seen this light on her when she was Ji EunTak and couldn't comprehend where she had hidden it when she was IlYoung. He watched her shove her hands in the pocket of her coat as she half jogged, half walked to the entrance of the restaurant. Almost as if she felt his eyes on her, she turned her head to search through the glass wall for him and when their eyes met, her face broke into a smile so wide it that he found himself smiling back at her just as wide. She waved at him excitedly before finally walking through the entrance.

He stood up and hurriedly pulled out her chair for her. He heard a giggle before she spoke, "Sunbaenim, such a gentleman!"

The production team had changed her hair. Gone were the soft straight strands his fingers had touched underneath her ball cap on the day they met in Kim EunSook's office. They had given her bangs and waves, like Hong Seol in "Cheese in the Trap," but had stayed away from a harsh change in color. He wondered if her hair was still just as soft.

"You didn't have to do that, though. We're not on a date!"

Her light easy manner was so easy to respond to. So he tipped his head to the side, looked at her askance and said, "Ah, but Lee Gon and TaeEul are."

One eyebrow curved up as she folder her arms across her chest, a light smile on her face. "But TaeEul is paying for the meal, right? How is that a date, sunbaenim?"

He pouted and put a hand on his chest in mock hurt. "I'll be giving you an entire Kingdom. That should count for something, right?"

She pouted right back at him and reached out to tap him on the side of his arm. "TaeEul doesn't need kingdoms, Pyeha. She needs chicken and beer." She scrunched up her nose at him and added, "Better luck next time, yeah?"

Outwitted, he accepted defeat and playfully hung his head in shame. Then he peered at her through his bangs that flopped boyishly on one side of his forehead and smiled at her warmly. They had fallen into their roles so easily in the first few minutes that they had been together, as if Kim EunSook had written them into the characters instead of the other way around. He had a feeling that playing this role would change his life, he just didn't know how.

Then they moved into rehearsals and the shoot for the first BBQ Chicken dinner scene and he was given a front row seat to the show that was Kim GoEun. She chose to change the inflection of her voice first, using the sound to command the rest of her body with. Gone were the sweet, teasing tones of earlier and in its place were the short, clipped tones of an annoyed Lt. Jeong TaeEul. Sometimes she would move in a more boxed manner, like a boy, and it worked so well with her too big clothes. He was so busy observing every little movement she made, tracking all the changes, even as he threw his lines back at her, that he didn't notice that the real show was staring at him in the face.

When the cameras started to roll and their assistants had drawn back, they were left in their own corner of the restaurant. There was nothing between them now, no script in hand obscuring half their faces, no PA hovering about and brushing back strands of hair, nothing except for a table full of chicken and beer.

The AD clapped his hands together to start the scene and both he and Kim GoEun sprung into action. Where he sat just a little straighter, more stiff, she had slouched into her chair and began digging, no, stabbing into the chicken.

"Why aren't you eating?"

Round cheeks full of food and one hand with a fork buried into a chicken leg, she had looked at him dead in the eye with such force that he was taken aback, offended for both himself and his character that this woman suddenly had more authority than he and Lee Gon combined. He held her stare for a few quiet seconds, and then surrendered to the way his body wanted to respond to Lt. Jeong TaeEul's thinly veiled threat.

He dropped his eyes and stared at the chicken like petulant child.

"I don't eat food that wasn't tasted beforehand."

It was in this moment that he understood the power that Kim GoEun held with just her eyes.

He had never been an actor that used instinct and intuition. He had always found it too loose. He liked the discipline and control of studying a character, anticipating a co-actor's action and preparing three different responses to it. Acting for him had always been a mental exercise. But for the first time in his career, he did something he never thought he would do – he let go. And it only took one look in Kim GoEun's eyes to teach him that there was still something more he could pull from inside him if he just learned to let go.

This was probably how he had developed the habit of openly staring at her. It did strange things to him and he couldn't understand how looking at her face, and into her eyes, could connect him to parts of himself he never knew he had access to. As an actor, of course. So until she notices and tells him to stop, he decided he would catalogue every detail of her face, peer into her eyes and let them take him to places he had never been inside himself.

It's not as if she doesn't stare at him too. She does, and just as openly too. It's just that she stares at him at the same time as everybody does. So no one notices. Like that time in Gwanghwamun Square when Lee Gon and Jeong TaeEul meet for the first time, she had stared at him while traffic stopped on both sides of the road because everyone wanted to see Lee MinHo riding an immaculate white horse and dressed like a real life prince.

She drew herself back amongst the crowd of onlookers as Lee MinHo rode Maximus onto the square with the an unworldly grace. When the director instructed him to pause and take in his surroundings, she took the same instruction but focused her gaze solely on the man who had always been Kim Tan to her, but something about the way he looked now, sitting atop this majestic horse in such a regal manner, told her that it was time to let go of Kim Tan and let this man in.

She was off to his side so she was sure he wouldn't see her. It was cold that night so she had jammed her hands into the pockets of her black coat. He didn't look like the cold touched him. He didn't look like anything could touch him, sitting so tall on top of an already large animal who followed his every command. Backlit by the traffic lights and brushed by a gentle breeze, his dark brown hair framed his face in a soft curtain. It was a delicious contrast to the sharp lines of his dark thick eyebrows, tall sharp nose, high cheekbones, and down to the strong curve of his jawline. His broad shoulders was made even broader by the midnight black velvet jacket he wore that was embellished with gold filigree on the high collar and cuffs and gold buttons that ran down on both sides of the lapel.

This must be what little girls feel like when they dream of Prince Charmings, thought Kim GoEun. Because that's exactly what it felt like to look at Lee MinHo in the middle of Gwanghwamun Square – a dream. And she was a little scared that if she spent too much time in this dream, approximately 7 months of it, then she might never wake up from it. Or want to.

The breeze blew a little harder and she shivered. She drew her coat tighter around herself and bounced on the balls of her feet. An AD signaled to her and regretfully, or maybe just a little relieved to have a reason to, she turned away from watching Lee MinHo to begin preparing for their scene together.

She paused mid-step. Her heart beat, just a little erratic. She had just realized that tonight, she had not been looking at him as Lee Gon, but as Lee MinHo. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, exhaled, and said to herself, "It does not mean more. Do not want more." Then she opened her eyes, cleared it of the fog she herself had created, and marched with sure, measured steps towards this beautiful man with a white horse.

"Sunbaenim, you looked so handsome with Maximus!"


	2. The Trouble with Staring at Kim Goeun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He counts every time he stared at her and the trouble it brought.

They were on the set of the precinct of Squad Three when the assistants brought in the paper bills from the Kingdom of Corea with his face plastered on them in full king regalia. Lee Minho had been to some strange photoshoots but this one took the cake. He looked so pompous and serious on that 100,000 won bill that he couldn’t help the bark of laughter that burst out of him.

Goeun sat across from him and stretched out her arms excitedly, wanting to see the bill herself. He handed it to her and his attention quickly shifted from his ridiculous face to hers. He watched as her eyes fell on his face on the bill and quickly darted up to his, making a lightning fast comparison before her whole face erupted in giggles. He saw her throw her head back, shoulders shaking in mirth while peals of laughter escaped from her small mouth that was shaped like an open mouthed smile.

He tipped his head to the side and rested his jaw on the back of his right hand, elbow on the table, as he watched her laugh some more.

“Sunbaenim,” she said as she leaned forward once more, a teasing glint in her eyes, “can you make the same Pyeha face like this on the bill? I want to see if it’s really you!

He had indulged her and given her his best serious Pyeha face.

That brought out another wave of giggles from her. But this time, he observed, she had thrown her head and torso forward, peeking time and again at his fake 100,000 won bill on the table. He found her laughter immensely interesting and tried to hide his widening smile with his fist. He had wondered what influenced the direction her body would take when laughing at something.

He could always just make her laugh all the time to find that out. They still had 8 months to shoot. There was still plenty of time to watch her.

But the trouble with staring at Kim Goeun, he realized belatedly, was that she stared right back. He found this out the hard way when they shot at the lobby of Paradise City Hotel in Incheon.

She was in character then, sitting on the lounge chairs with a scowl on her pretty face, still swathed in her serviceable black detective trench coat. Even from afar, he could feel the full force of Jeong TaeEul’s irritation as he made his way to her. He felt her hard dark eyes following his long languid movements and he ended up tripping over his own feet, his right slipper flying out.

He recovered as gracefully as he could, his face remaining passive. He could’ve gone on with the scene but the moment Goeun’s cheeks bubbled up with barely repressed laughter before finally giving in to her giggles, his face had already matched hers. Only his laugh was that of embarrassment. Apparently, even the littlest of things can make her laugh big, too, he thought, as he went back to his position to begin filming once more.

Another trouble that came with it was that her laughter was often infectious. It was especially hardest to resist her when they had to stare at each other with only a table between them. Somehow, a sturdy solid matter wasn’t enough to keep them from giggling like a couple of schoolchildren.

Like that time they shot the MSD scene in BBQ Chicken and Goeun had found it hilarious that she shook the drink a little too violently in the “shaking” part of Taeeul’s MSD, splashing some of it on the table, chicken, and herself.

“One shot for the king!”

She had delivered that line perfectly, with the required sarcasm. But as soon as she put the glass down, she had leaned back and away from the camera frame. Then she bit her lower lip to keep the giggles from breaking out. The lip biting was new, he noted. And as usual, he had tried to remain unflappable.

But he was supposed to laugh in that scene anyway, just a little chuckle. So he did. But the laughter he had tried to keep in remained in his cheeks and he tried to pass it off as a rueful smile and headshake as he began his line.

“The MSD you know and the MSD I know,” came out okay but halfway through the giggles had broken out, triggering more from her. She tried to cover her face with her hand in an attempt to save the situation. But it seemed that both of them were helpless when it came to holding it back. And so the end of his line, “are so different” got lost in the long fit of giggles that had now overtaken both of them and the crew.

“It’s hard to hold back! I laughed for real!” He told Goeun, who was openly laughing now, swaying forward and sideways, the tips of her hair grazing the chicken on the table. He had the sudden urge to gather her hair in his hand and slide it over her shoulder. He staved it off by squeezing his thigh under the table.

Holding onto his tapering laughter, he turned to give their director an apologetic smile and remorsefully said, “If only I held it in for a little while more.”

Bad as it had been, it wasn’t the worst.

It came when they were shooting at Hallim Library in Suwon City. All they needed was a clip where TaeEul had to look up from reading a book and for her stare at him as if he wasn’t there, but wishing he was. It had taken them four takes to get it.

The set assistant had been fussing with his hair at that time and she had all of his hair combed out front, hanging over his forehead, while trying to pat down the back part. Goeun took one look at him over the edge of the script she had been studying and had said, “Kim Tan” with a little tilt of her head.

As if caught doing something naughty, she had clapped the script over her mouth as she tried to smother her giggles. It constantly amazed him to find out she was like this on set. Watching her play character after character on film and tv gave him the impression that she would be standoffish, immersed in her character like most method actors. He had no idea she was as playful as he was on set and it had made working with her so easy. He couldn’t say the same for their director though.

On the first take, Goeun had slowly moved her head up. He watched as her eyes walked the distance between them, feeling them climb up his chest, neck, mouth, and nose. But before he could hold her gaze, she had released a soft snort and squeezed eyes shut. Again, he saw her throw her head up and back in unrepressed laughter.

“Why?”

He wondered what was it about his face that made her laugh like that. His nose twitched and he found himself laughing at her laughter and it only made her giggle harder. He found the idea of them laughing without knowing why the other was laughing completely ludicrous that on the second take, it was he who had given in to his own chortles.

On the third take, Goeun hadn’t laughed. Instead, she had tamed down her giggles to a soft, small, shy smile. It hit him differently then and he couldn’t help the way his mouth fell open a little, like his breath had been knocked out from him for a couple of seconds.

She had taken this as laughter and had, as expected, broken out in giggles once more. He was a little grateful for that and decided to ride it by facing the director and blaming their gaffe on Goeun who had kept right on laughing. He heard Woo Dohwan in the background breaking away from his position and teasingly threatening them that he was going home if they didn’t get it right next time.  
  
They barely survived the fourth take. When the director finally yelled cut, both he and Goeun had sagged in relief at finally completing the scene. Their eyes met and they shared sheepish smiles.

Woo Dohwan had asked him later on their way back to their respective vans what they were laughing so hard about. The question had stumped him for a few seconds. And then, he replied honestly, “I guess when I see her laughing or smiling at me, I can’t help but do the same thing.”

Woo Dohwan had given him a doubtful look, smiled, but said no more. They both left it at that.

But it was a lie.

Because while shooting for the 5th episode at the stables at Vivaldi Park Equestrian Club, Goeun wasn’t even looking at him when he did it. She was looking at Woo Dohwan. They were working on getting the timing right for their scene where she has to grab his gun to check if it was real. He stood between them, off the their sides.

He watched as Goeun pointed at Dohwan’s gun, the tough and brusque Lt. Jeong Taeeul, and moved to grab it. But she had raised her hand a little too early, anticipating the grab Dohwan would make, and he moved a little too late. They ended up looking like they were about to dance at masquerade ball and both of them had erupted in the now, all too familiar peals of laughter. Then they got right back to work and had gotten it right on the second try.

It wasn’t until later when he was reviewing their scene on the small monitor that he saw it. His face had softened into a smile as Goeun and Dohwan laughed at their mistake. It was a rare kind of smile, the kind that puffed up his cheeks and even made his deep-set eyes crinkle into two tiny slits. There was a gentleness to it, especially the way his head followed the direction of Goeun’s movements as if his smile was a satellite to hers. And she wasn’t even smiling for him, at him.

It was the first time he saw himself as he stared at Kim Goeun. So that’s what he looked like when he was happy, he thought.

It occurred to him that he no longer stared at her to study her. He sought out her face now like she was sunshine and sunsets all rolled into one.  
  
And by the time they shot the 8th episode for Taeeul’s characteristically matter of fact “I love you,” Lee Minho had finally realized how deep into the rabbit hole he had fallen after diving into Kim Goeun’s eyes. He hadn’t even reached the end of it. He was still falling.

He knew Lee Gon had to have a wide but still dignified smile on his face as he walked towards Taeeul under the golden glow of the afternoon sun outside Paradise City Hotel. He was a king, after all. Kings weren’t giddy schoolboys who couldn’t hold back excited grins as they walked towards a girl they liked. But he couldn’t help it.

Because the sunshine on Kim Goeun’s face under the halo of a sunset made his heart ache for things he knew he shouldn’t but at the same time, filled him to the brim with happiness because for a few glorious moments, he could pretend she was his.

The director had yelled cut before he could even begin his lines and dutifully, he went back to his starting point. This time he was more successful at schooling his features into a somewhat more dignified version of Lee Gon. He stopped in front her, flipped his wrist to check the time and said, “Eight minutes and 40 seconds. I came down right away.”

Goeun’s eyes were a liquid pool of amber sunlight and doubts as dark as Jeong TaeEul’s questions on destiny and choices. But he held on, not wanting to disappoint her by mucking up a scene.

“Yeong wanted to follow me, so I—“

He watched her eyes turn from TaeEul’s troubled ones to her own confused ones. She had missed something while looking at him and she was at a loss as to what it was. He quickly broke off from the stiffness of Lee Gon and angled his head sideways as he reminded her about cutting him off mid-sentence.

It took her a few seconds before she got it and he found it adorable how quickly her eyes turned blank before coming to life once more once the realization sunk in. Then she had laughed at herself, embarrassed at such a rookie mistake and as had become a habit of hers when laughing, she reached out to gently hit him. He blocked her little fist with his forearm and wondered what she would do if he caught her hand and held it. He walked the thought off and went back to his position to redo the scene.

They breezed through the scene perfectly.

But then the wind picked up a few stray strands of Kim Goeun’s hair and blew it gently up and around her face. The afternoon light had changed, filtered into a warm glow on the left side of her soft cheek. Her gaze locked with his and he found himself refusing to blink so he wouldn’t miss anything.

Then her eyes told him before he even heard her say the words, “I love you.”

He was hit with the sound of the ocean roaring in his ears. There was water in the rabbit hole and he was drowning.

When she looked back at him expectantly after turning to walk away, he knew he had fucked up.

“Oh.”

He knew was supposed to say something but he had just stood there, basking in the afterglow of her pretend I love you. And when he finally remembered, his body bowed slightly under the weight of this embarrassment. It was probably too much to hope that no one would notice why he kept on making mistakes like this.

“I’m supposed to call you.”

So the next time he had to shoot with Kim Goeun under the glow of a softly setting sun and gently blowing wind, he asked to wear shades. Shooting for the 9th episode brought them to a long stretch of a dusty countryside road with tall shrubs made golden with autumn colors. Under the protection of the dark glasses, he stared at her all he wanted without guarding whatever his eyes said. She had been so playful that day, holding onto his hands and swaying them from side to side. And even though it toyed with every other emotion he had, he was only too happy to let her have her way. She had seemed happy that day, too.

And by the time they shot the 10th episode, he had learned to read more than just happiness on the face of Kim Goeun.

Emotionally grueling scenes took a toll on them as actors, and they had many of them together. However, none of them had demanded as much as the last scene of the 10th episode thus far. Lee Gon was set to disappear mid kiss, gone as quickly as he had arrived in time to give TaeEul flowers and to tell her how much he loved her.

They had been preparing for their tear-filled kiss at that time and in the midst of getting himself into a Lee Gon awash with regret and lost in the dredges of time, he saw it. He saw the fatigue around her red-rimmed eyes even as she tried her hardest to remain cheerful despite feeling like she was drowning in emotion and lack of sleep. Her eyes weren’t as bright and her smile drew into a straight line instead of a curve that usually lifted her cheeks.

Helpless that he couldn’t simply take all of it away, he had made up his mind as soon as they finished the take on their kiss. He knew she had to prepare herself mentally for this critical scene and would probably need space. Nonessential crew had mostly cleared out of the yard in front of the Hero Taekwondo Center to give her a better, more desolate, atmosphere. As much as he had been looking forward to watching her nail this heartbreaking scene up close, taking care of her seemed much more important now. So he had quietly slipped away from the set, looked for a quiet corner, and phoned his manager.

“Hey! We’re almost finished, yeah. Listen, can I ask you for a favor? I need you to get me spicy chicken feet and jjamppong to go. Maybe in about 10 minutes?”

Then he stood in the cold night air and waited for his manager to deliver the food. By the time he had gotten it and walked back to the set, Goeun had finished her scene and was sitting beside the director, reviewing the footage. He hung back a bit, watching her as her face switched back and forth between the two monitors in front of her. Her eyelids were slightly swollen from crying so much and it looked like she hadn’t even stopped yet. Her eyebrows twitched and drew together as her eyes welled up with tears once more. Watching herself breakdown on screen seemed to intensify the heartache she had tapped into. She looked like she didn’t know where to look, wanting to hide her face but knowing that she still had to check the footage in front of her.

He knew she took great pride in her work and he admired her for that greatly. He also knew she knew how to take care of herself and didn’t need him to remind her to. But just in case she forgot it for a few seconds, he hoped that her go to food when stressed would help out.

When it looked like the director had given her the okay sign and everyone left at the scene began clearing out, he stepped into her line of vision with her food in a brown paper bag behind him. She stopped walking when she saw him approaching her and gave him a look that startled him a little.

She looked like a hurt puppy he had just kicked. Then she looked down and away, wringing her hands together in front of her. She turned away from him and walked into the temporary branch of The Alley across the yard. He followed her inside and found her leaning against a red brick pillar, hidden from everyone’s view.

“You were gone,” came her plaintive cry in the semi darkness.

Lee Minho felt his heart go out to her. He had always had a switch when it came to emotionally demanding scenes but she seemed to have had a hard time extracting herself from Taeeul’s sadness. That’s how deep she went as an actress and he admired her total submission to her craft. He just wished he knew how to help ease her out of it with more than just jjamppong and spicy chicken feet.

Gently, he began, “He isn’t, not really. Remember? He gets back to her correct time in the end.”

That made her sniffle and she swiped at her eyes and nose with the back of her sweater sleeve. “No, you left,” she said in a small voice, “you left. I couldn’t find you after…”

Unable to finish her sentence, she just looked up at him as if willing him to understand by her eyes alone. She looked to him like she was about to crumble under the weight of Jeong TaeEul’s emotions and Lee Minho couldn’t stand not being able to do anything for her anymore.

So he crossed the space between them and drew her slight shoulders into his arms, careful not to startle her in case the gesture was not welcome. Tentatively, she rested cheek against his chest, nestling the top her head neatly under his chin. He took that as permission and tightened his arms around her, holding her together so she could allow herself to fall apart just a little.

“After our scene, I…it was hard to… you were gone and I couldn’t…” she babbled as her shoulders shook with the force of her leftover emotions.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered onto the top of her head. “I won’t leave next time. I’m sorry.”

She had probably needed to reassure the TaeEul in her mind that Lee Gon wasn’t really gone in order to stave off the tsunami of sadness she had triggered. And when she couldn’t find him, she hadn’t been able to keep TaeEul’s tears at bay. So he just held on to her until she could tell TaeEul that Lee Gon was still there. He held on to her until TaeEul had quieted down, until she was Goeun again.

When he heard her sniffles turn into curious sniffs in the air, he slowly released the iron bands of his arms around her and stepped back, giving her back her space. When she sniffed the air once more, he showed her the paper bag he had been holding in one hand.

She looked at it curiously and gave it one more sniff. He smiled a little and bumped it on her nose. Then he watched as Goeun’s smile slowly returned to her lips as she realized what was in the bag. She looked up at him, beaming.

“Yes. Spicy jjamppong and chicken feet.”

Goeun eagerly snatched the paper bag from his hand and held it close to her chest. She looked up at him once more, her grateful heart in her eyes. He saw her thank him before he even heard it.

Sometimes she was easy to read like that. But then there were also times when she wasn’t.

Like that time they were at a private hospital to shoot their characters’ visit to Woo Dohwan’s Eunsop for the 12th episode. She had been unreadable then.

Once again, she and Woo Dohwan were discussing the best way to hug and he had to stand there beside her while they figured it out. They, as in just her and Dohwan. Something had shifted in the air between him and Goeun by then but the unspoken nature of it had probably gotten to him.

Because he was much taller than her, Dohwan had to spread and bend his legs in order to rest his face onto the crook of Goeun’s neck and shoulder. They tried doing it on her right shoulder first and then switched to the left.

Watching another man gather Goeun into his arms, no matter how platonic their relationship was, disconcerted him. And for a second, he kind of forgot that they were all at work.

“How about a 3rd option?” he had mumbled before he could stop himself. He had tried to pass it off as light sarcasm by adding a nervous laugh at the end. But Wo Dohwan had given him a sly look over his shoulder as he walked back to his mark, ready to start shooting. With that one quick look, saber sharp from Dohwan’s eyes, he knew he got caught and guiltily shot his friend an apologetic smile.

But when he chanced a glance at Goeun to his right, her face was a great wall of ice. He swallowed nervously.

Then he watched in amazement as her face sputtered to life when the director began to roll the cameras. He fought the irrational anger that rose from his chest when he saw Goeun beaming and throwing looks of affection at someone other than him.

He had been so busy staring at her that he had failed to realize he wasn’t the only one looking at her. Sure, Woo Dohwan didn’t really see her that way. But the rest of the world was looking too, especially with their show being released all over the world. And he couldn’t imagine anyone ever looking at Kim Goeun, see what he was seeing, and not fall as he had fallen. And falling, still.

She wasn’t his Minomi keychain he could keep safe in his pocket, away from anyone’s grubby hands. She wasn’t his, period. And he wondered exactly when he had started to want more than just the freedom to stare at her.


	3. A Line More Difficult to Cross than the Universe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She draws an invisible line between them and counts every time she nearly crossed it.

He always seemed to know how to position his body against hers – a physicality she had grown to admire about him as an actor. She had taken it for granted and relied mostly on points by her directors in order to get her body to move a certain way. But Lee Minho had full command of his body and knew how to use it without anyone telling him to.

She didn’t see it in grand action scenes but in the little every day details of his movements – how he stood up straighter, stiffer, and would only turn to her with a slight tilt of his head when he was Lee Gon. It was a stark difference to the way he was with her off camera. He would, without fail, always bend his whole body so he could meet her eyes whenever they talked and she didn’t have to crane her neck up so far. She saw it in the way he walked next to or sat across from Jeong Taeeul and she had wondered if she had created the same thing for Taeeul herself.

She also saw it in the way he seemed to know exactly how to position her own body against his. He was the one who showed her how to pull away from his tight hug and push him at the same time in Gwanghwamun Square. Even though that tight hug had resulted in a minor mishap when the large gold buttons on his jacket crushed her chin, he had quickly adjusted the way he took her in his arms, careful to position her head between his lapels. And when all she had been focused on was slapping handcuffs on him, he also showed her how she can properly cart him away like policemen in movies do.

“When you walk behind me,” he had said as he turned to show her how his arm should look like and continued, “try grabbing my left forearm with your left hand so you can twist it, push it up my back. Like this.” He turned his left palm facing out and back in to show her what he meant.

So she had moved as he had told her to and was so pleased that the scene turned out so well. She had given his arm a light squeeze as they moved off the camera frame and softly said, “Thank you for helping me with the whole arm twisty stuff.”

Then three things happened at the same. He twisted his arm right back to a comfortable position, palm open. Her fingers loosened their hold on his forearm and slid down the velvet softness of his sleeve. And both of them moved in opposite directions at the same time. All three of which resulted in his fingers catching hers, for a brief electric moment, just before they slipped out of his reach.

It wasn’t as if the earth stood still for her or any tripe like that. The world kept right on spinning; the shoot continued on, they both laughed at the amount of rehearsal it took to get their scene right; they walked back to their director to check out their footage. The world had kept on spinning, yes, but for Kim Goeun, it just seemed like her world had begun spinning a little too fast.

So when they shared a pair of earbuds to check their footage and he moved to place the other piece in her ear, she shifted slightly away from him. She took the earbud from him, placed it in her own ear, and jammed her all her fingers deep into the pockets of her coat.

There was a latitude between them that was filled with so many reasons why she shouldn’t ever let him catch her fingers that way again. But they still had 8 more months of this and everyday, it got harder and harder to keep track of that invisible line.

When the world’s slowly tilting axis brought them to fall in Daegu’s Jungri Sports Park, she found herself toeing that line. Later on, she would blame it on the Sugar and Korean Maple trees in various stages of autumnal colors that lined the gently winding cobblestone path. Fall was a beautiful season.

She had tried to stay away, choosing to sit on one of the benches while he walked around a little, taking pictures with his phone. She had distracted herself with muttering her lines under her breath and later on, just humming a song while swaying from side to side. The scene involved a lot of extras today who had to pretend as if they were frozen in time. She had to do that as well and was a bit worried about how well she could carry that out. Staying still was never something she did well at.

A shadow fell upon her and she looked up to find him standing in front of her in full Lee Gon costume, camel brown pants and long jacket over a white turtleneck, whip in hand. His hair had been brushed in such a way that a few tendrils fell over one side of his forehead. Fall was a beautiful season but Lee Minho standing in the middle of a shower of soft sunlight and leaves in different degrees of yellows, reds, and oranges was even more beautiful.

She didn’t really know what to say at that moment but she could see that he was standing in such a way that favored his right leg. So she scooted over to one side of the bench, leaving enough room for him to sit on in case he was tired of standing. She knew about the two accidents he had in 2006 and 2011 that had left a metal plate on his right leg.

He took the invitation and sat beside her on the bench, careful not to crumple the lower end of his long jacket. She heard him release a low hiss as he gingerly stretched out his right leg, massaging the area around his knee lightly while keeping hold of Lee Gon’s riding crop with his left hand.

“Does it still hurt?”

He turned his face to hers and gave her a look halfway between a smile and a grimace. “Promise not to tell the director? It hurts, time and again. I just have to make sure I don’t keep standing for more than 20 minutes straight.”

Her eyebrows drew together in concern, whizzing past all their long hours of rehearsal and shooting. Then she looked down and started fiddling with her hands on her lap. She went through each long day they have had together and wondered whether he had been secretly frustrated with her sudden bursts of laughter that prolonged their shooting time. She should really have been more considerate.

“Hey,” he said softly, “look at me.”

Her frown deepened, pout more prominent.

“Goeunsshi, look at me,” he said more firmly.

Reluctantly, she turned her worried and remorseful face towards him. Then she felt the soft tap tap of the small square piece of leather at the end of his riding crop hit her gently on her lips. It had startled her a bit but Lee Minho had leaned closer to her, making sure that she couldn’t look anywhere except deep into his eyes.

“Stop pouting. You didn’t do anything wrong. ” He told her in a stern, clear voice. “So I need you to stop pouting.” His eyes fell on her lips and lingered a little bit more. “Please.”

She gave him a little glare but put her pout away. Then she saw his eyes shift back up to meet hers. The autumn sun sifted through his eyelashes and turned his deep-set brown eyes into molten pieces of russet fire with specks of gold and red, as if the maple leaves around them had gathered behind his eyes. Kim Goeun could hardly look at them without feeling a pull from deep within her belly.

“Every moment I’ve spent with you has been tiring, yes. But because I was with you, I never felt it.” He held her eyes for a few seconds more. “Not even once.”

And then the director’s voice had boomed from the megaphone, telling them to get into position. Both of them sprang into action, getting up from the bench and awaiting further instruction. While their director first addressed the extras around them, they started throwing their lines at each other to warm up.

_“So take care of it like you take care of your of your Senior Seventh Rank Official. This thing is a Senior Fifth Rank Official to me, okay?_

_“Time stopped for a bit just now. Didn’t you feel that?”_

The wind picked up a bit, carrying a bit more of that autumn chill and scattering a few leaves in the air. She drew her knitted sweater close and crossed her arms across her chest to keep warm.

_“Why would time stop? Did you decide to get weirder?”_

She watched him absently pick up a fallen leaf that got stuck on the sleeve of her sweater without missing a beat of his next line.

_“Everything stopped except for me.”_

_“Why not you?”_

_“It’s a theory, but I think it might be a side effect of using that door. But thanks to that, I saw something beautiful.”_

She gave him a quick smile as they finished that run through. Then she wondered if she should have counted how long they’ve been standing and her eyes strayed to his right leg. He must have been lying through his teeth when he said he didn’t feel the fatigue of their long hours just to make her feel better. She knew had promised herself not to cross a line between them but surely, caring for his well-being wouldn’t be considered a breach of that.

“Don’t forget to sit down in a few minutes okay?” She threw a small smile up at him and awkwardly tapped his right arm. Twice. She didn’t know why she had to do that twice. But then he started chuckling and suddenly it didn’t seem so awkward anymore. So she laughed with him and it felt a lot like a light cool breeze on an autumn day bathed in sunshine. He had a gift for making people feel like they were light enough to dance in the wind like leaves suspended in a perpetual twirl on a fall day just like this. Surely, she hoped, thoughts like this weren’t a breach of that invisible line.

As if the world was listening to her thoughts, a gentle wind blew just then, sending a few strands of her hair across her face. And then she saw it— the wind had left a bright red Korean Maple leaf perched on Lee Minho’s left shoulder. It seemed so content there, nestled on the wide curve of his strong shoulder. Then she suddenly felt like she would be sad if the leaf fell and lost its precarious hold on his shoulder. It was just a tiny, brittle, leaf after all. So she reached out and readjusted her bright red maple leaf on his shoulder so it could hold on to him for a little longer.

Desperately, she held on to the belief that thoughts like that weren’t a breach of that invisible line.

By the time the earth’s axis had completed its tilt and brought them to winter in Jeong TaeEul’s yard in Chungju for the 4th episode, Kim Goeun had got it in her head that she had perfected the art of escaping from Lee Minho’s fingertips. But tonight’s shoot was going to challenge that and she had no idea how she was going to survive this night.

First, she had to stand still while he gathered her hair in one hand at the base of her neck while smoothing away stray strands and tucking them behind her left ear. It was cold. It was winter. She told herself those things again and again as she fought off the little shivers that skirted up her spine whenever the fingers of his left hand buried themselves in her hair and gathered them in his fist. She could feel the heat of his wrist at the nape of her neck, penetrating the thick scarf she wore.

But the worst of the shivers came when he would tuck her hair behind her right ear and his fingertips, light as the first snowfall in winter, would trace the soft shell of her ear. Her only solace was that she didn’t have to look at him while he did it. She fixed her gaze straight onto his chest, even during rehearsal. She prayed he would get it on the first take.

But the riding crop was in the way. She could feel his fingers fumbling with it while some of her hair escaped. She caught the way his chest moved whenever he was trying to swallow his laughter and she knew that he knew he had screwed up the take. When she felt him give in to his laughter, she faked a laugh as best as she could, brought up both hands to hit him on his shoulders, and gave him a little push.

She could hardly breathe with him being so near and so everywhere around her. She just wanted a few seconds to catch her breath.

Laughing nervously, and maybe with a little bit of panic, she told him, “Put that in your pocket!” while pointing at his riding crop.

The smile he gave her was a little too wide, a little too knowing, and it annoyed her to no end. She wrinkled her nose at him in frustration and made a face. His smile just became wider, more knowing.

Then he got everything right on the second take. She would have rejoiced at the end of it but there were more scenes and the night was long. The next thing they had to shoot was Lee Gon lifting Taeeul up onto Maximus before they crossed the portal to the Kingdom of Corea.

When he first tried to lift her, his hands went directly under armpits and she felt more like a child than lover and it had genuinely made her laugh. Then the director told him to hold her waist and the laughter kind of died in the middle of her throat.

“You want me to lift her slowly instead of in one quick sweeping motion, right?” he had asked the director while his hands readied themselves around her waist. She then reached up, way up, and settled her hands carefully on his broad shoulders.

“I’ll tell you how!” she insisted, lightly hitting him and feeling the solid mass of his shoulders beneath his jacket. “Just lift me.”

He smiled down at her and cheekily began counting to three. She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. She really didn’t like the way he was smiling at her all evening, like he knew something she didn’t. When his count ran down to 1, she jumped up expecting a boost from him that never came and everyone burst out laughing. It was a little funny, she had to admit, but she as beginning to feel like a little hamster in a cage he was toying with.

“You have to lift me!” she cried, hitting him on the shoulders while laughing. She was about to tell him to just bend his knees to get more momentum to lift her when she realized what the problem was. They had been standing there, in the dead of winter, for hours already. And she hadn’t seen him take a single break since they had started. Pissed that she hadn’t been more vigilant about that, and also annoyed that he hadn’t taken a break like he should, she tried to think of a solution without bringing too much attention to his injured leg.

She quickly turned away from him and began talking to the director in a quieter voice, “If he lifts me seriously, it’ll be too quick and we won’t get a good shot,” she said. “So how about we just, uh, get me to stand on a stool or something and have him hold me as if he had lifted me?”

Their director shook his head and said, “We would still need to shoot the actual lifting though.”

Then Lee Minho sidled up to them and interrupted their conversation with a more sound suggestion, “How about we just get someone to lift her from below her knees?” She felt him sneak a hand across her back and wrap it around her upper arm. She looked up at him when she felt him give her arm a squeeze. He was looking down at her, his eyes soft with grateful understanding but dark with something else entirely. He was a little hard to read tonight, she thought to herself.

But for all the confusing smiles he had been throwing at her all night, the smile he gave her when she was magically lifted up might just be her favorite. It was a rare opportunity for her to be looking down at him. It’s not like he looked any different from above. He was just as handsome, but without the added pain in the neck when looking up at him. But with her hair falling in a soft curtain around them, she felt like she could freely look at him without fear of being observed by a thousand pairs of eyes.

And then his eyes had begun to crinkle in the corners, the way they would when his smile had grown too big that even his cheeks couldn’t contain it. But that’s exactly what he seemed to be doing – he looked like he was trying to contain a bigger smile by keeping his lips tightly shut. It was as if letting out a smile as big as that was tantamount to having his heart burst wide open; so his lips seal it tight but the curve of that smile promised, “later, wait a bit more.”

Bashfully, he had lowered his eyes and looked elsewhere even as his smile remained on his lips. She had never seen him look as boyishly charming as he did just now. And the fact that he was a 33-year-old man now made it seem all the more precious. She had decided then that this was her favorite Lee Minho smile.

When her feet hit solid ground once more after the take, she realized it was a little too late to check her self. Picking a favorite smile was toeing the invisible line between them. But she had no time to process this because the next few moments were like a barrage on her senses, beating on her resolve.

His legs slid close to hers when he had climbed onto Maximus behind her, their knees, thighs, and hips slotting together like tongue to grove in wood joinery. Then his arms closed around her to place the reins in her hands. There was no escaping him now, not even in her head. The trepidation and quiet panic on her face wasn’t hard to fake for the camera.

“Hold the rope tightly,” he said before his arms became hot steel bands that caged her in, “I’ll hold you.” His chest was a furnace on her back and if she closed her eyes, it felt a lot like being locked in a toasty, contented embrace with a beloved on a cold winter day near a fireplace. Kim Goeun couldn’t quell the rising panic in her chest.

Mercifully, the director had yelled, “Cut!” after that. So she twittered nervously and tried to joke with him to clear the fog in her head.

“Am I supposed to hold it like this?” she teased as she held up the reins he had bunched together in her hand. Then she scooted forward, hoping for a little distance.

“Shouldn’t I hold it like this instead?” she said as she held reins separately with both hands as she had learned back when she had to play Hongyi in “Memories of the Sword.”

He peered at her hands over her shoulders and laughed, reached over her to adjust the reins once more, unnecessarily. Then his fingertips grazed the back of her hands. It was still there, the electric charge she had felt back in Gwanghwamun Square. But now his hands were on either side of her hips, holding her steady as he adjusted his hips closer to her once more, putting the front of his body flush against the back of hers. And then his arms closed around her once more, a cocoon of warmth on a cold day in winter.

She hated how easily his fingertips became tinder to a fire that spread through her wherever his touch landed. But what she hated even more was the quiet sort of contentment that washed over her whenever she was wrapped inside his arms.

So she tightened her hold on the reins and held on. One more take till they got it right, she told herself. She had decided to allow herself this one last moment of weakness at his nearness, to let herself melt into this...whatever this was.

It was okay. It was winter; he was warm. There was fake snow; and she was allowed to feel things on days when the nights were longer as long as she knew the difference between hers and Taeeul’s feelings when she woke up tomorrow.

Then she promised herself that tomorrow, she would redraw that invisible line and stay within her hemisphere, no matter how much Lee Minho made her world tilt.

It was Woo Dohwan who had to stand there and watch her do it. Not that she was aware he was watching her. He doubted if she even had room in her mind to be aware of anything else besides trying to skirt away from Lee Minho without being too obvious about it.

And she was damn good at it. So good, in fact, that his friend, His Majesty Mr. Asthmatic Giggles never noticed that her continuously slipping out of his grasp while still being within his reach was deliberate. And how would he? Kim Goeun’s laughter rang the same whether she was in the yard in Chungju, Hallim Library, and now here at Ahopsan Bamboo Forest in Busan.

But Woo Dohwan wasn’t falling madly in love with Kim Goeun so he knew the difference in the way she would openly link her arms to his or Kim Kyungnam’s during breaks, how she wouldn’t hesitate to grab their hands or arms while laughing at a mistake during a take, or how, when talking to them, her face was open all the way through to her eyes.

While she was the same with Lee Minho, he could clearly see, even standing a few feet away from them as they rehearsed their arrival a the Kingdom of Corea, how she was a ball of nervous energy around him. She was too aware of where he was, too aware of where she was, while her eyes remained vigilant for the roving BTS cameras. She looked like she was desperately hiding something. Woo Dohwan wondered whether she knew what she was hiding it from— the world or herself.

But even though what she was giving him were crumbs compared to the affection she had showered her other co-stars, his friend didn’t seem to care. What little Lee Minho had been given was enough to make him glow like the moon through the clouds in this bamboo forest in the dark.

He watched his friend rehearse with her while moving around her as if in orbit. When she moved, he moved closer. When she smiled, he smiled wider. When she laughed, he laughed harder. And even when she wasn’t looking, he looked. Woo Dohwan wondered if Lee Minho knew what he looked like when he was looking at Kim Goeun.

This was 10 times as bad as when they were all at the Hallim Library in Suwon and they still had 11 more episodes to go. He wondered how long they would last without combusting from resisting their gravitation pull, or exploding when they gave in to it. One thing was for sure – Woo Dohwan was getting a front row seat to the Lee Minho and Kim Goeun Saga.

Then the director signaled the start of the shoot and he and the rest of the royal guards positioned themselves into a letter V with him in the middle. He then schooled his face in to the severe expression of Yeong as he watched the two of them climb back on to Maximus.

Unlike Jeong Taeeul, Kim Goeun knew how to ride a horse and mounted Maximus gracefully. Lee Minho had stood close by, always watching and ready to offer her anything should she ask. And when she was settled properly, he had climbed up after her. Then the bamboo forest was suddenly flooded with artificial light as they prepared to shoot the last scene for episode 4.

He watched as Lee Minho morphed into a much more dignified version of himself as Lee Gon, wiping off the boyish grin and sparkling eyes of before and replacing it with the regal and magnanimous air of a monarch as he commanded the royal guards to step back. He watched as Kim Goeun tamed her chaotic energy into the cool façade of Jeong Taeeul, but something about her remained the same and it only served to feed the crackle in the air as their two figures remained in a tight, almost embrace as they spoke. And when Lee Gon put his lips near Jeong Taeeul’s ear to tell her of his name which she can not speak, Woo Dohwan could swear that the air around them had absolutely buzzed with an unnamable force.

Or maybe he was just a hopeless romantic.

But then, Taeeul had slowly turned her head to face Lee Gon. The movement was so measured, so careful, it almost looked like the first brush of lips against lips of a first kiss. And at last, when they finally locked eyes, their faces close enough for their breaths to ghost over their skin like kisses, but too far away to kiss like they needed it to breathe, Woo Dohwan felt like someone had passed through the portal to a parallel world and stopped time.

It was almost too intimate to watch and he wished he could look away to give them privacy. But cameras were still rolling and he prayed for the director to yell cut soon. When it came, he saw how fast Kim Goeun retreated back into her deceivingly cheerful self, quickly dismounted from Maximus, and scurried off to her waiting staff. But not before she threw Lee Minho a starlit smile and shy little wave bye bye.

And his friend was none the wiser. He was left there on top of this beautiful white horse, smiling softly to himself as he stared longingly at Kim Goeun’s retreating figure. Truthfully, it was pathetic. Clearly, his Pyeha needed a wingman and as he was the Unbreakable Sword, he felt it was his duty to help the poor sod. After all, he was a hopeless romantic.

But first, he needed to get Lee Minho’s attention. With an evil smile, he shone the 1,200 lumen flashlight straight into Lee Minho’s face, almost blinding him.

“Pyeha! Let me escort you to the nearest bar. 2 bottles, max.”


	4. Fate is the Footsteps You Take By Risking Your Whole Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He counts all the times he tried, and failed, to hold her hand.

The drive to Seoul from Busan was going to take him 4 hours and maybe about 30 minutes given the traffic. His manager offered to drive him but Lee Minho insisted on driving to give himself time to think. Four hours or so should be enough. The past few days of zipping through Incheon, Paju, and Busan had been tiring but none more so than all the thoughts running in a loop inside his head, and a picture in his phone burning through his pocket.

He had just stood on the craggy rocks on the shores of Busan with Jeon Musong who played his uncle, Prince Buyeong. With the seawater battening endlessly against the huge unmovable rocks, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that that had been a pivotal moment for him as much as it was for his character, Lee Gon.

_Uncle, do you believe in fate?_

_It’s not something clear. People usually tell fate to move aside and challenge it. Should I fight against it?_

This scene played on and on in his head as he drove, adding to the movie that had been playing there a day before. He had gone drinking with Woo Dohwan while they were in Incheon and he could distinctly recall how pathetically he had laid his cards on the table in front of his friend.

“I can’t even catch her hands.”

Lee Minho had raised his bleary eyes at Woo Dohwan. They had taken advantage of the tucked away corner of black couches in Paradise City Hotel’s Bar 21 for a few drinks after they had filmed the confrontation between Lee Gon, Jo Yeong, and Kang Shinjae. All three of them were supposed to go but Kim Kyungnam had to beg off as he had a full day of shooting with Kim Goeun tomorrow.

At the mention of her name and the idea that she was shooting with someone other than him, Lee Minho’s face had fallen so visibly that Kim Kyungnam had exited with as much haste as he could. It was then that Woo Dohwan had steered him into the bar for that much needed pep talk.

And now here they were, with Lee Minho slouched over his half finished beer but absolutely sloshed, while Woo Dohwan nursed his third bottle.

“Her hands were right there! Like this—“

He had taken Dohwan’s hands and stretched them out across the table. Then he looked at him square in the eyes and said with much seriousness, “These are my hands. They’re yours. Your hands. But they were me. My hands. Okay?”

Woo Dohwan had nodded at him patiently and let him continue regaling him with the story of how he had tried, and failed, to catch her hands while shooting for their kitchen scene in episode 6.

“And these were her hands,” he had said and stretched out his own hands, putting them slightly above Dohwan’s. “Very close right? Right. Very easy to catch, right?”

Then Lee Minho had started waving his hands up and around like two crazy helicopters. “Nope! Not easy to catch! Because her hands and arms were like this! That’s the trouble with having small, but very pretty, hands. They move so fast! You know what I was able to catch?”

Resignedly, Woo Dohwan had offered his arms to him again.

“Her wrists!” Lee Minho had grabbed Dohwan’s right wrist first. “But not at the same time, that wily little rabbit. When I finally got hold of her other wrist, she had already slipped the first one out of my hand!”

“But you did get to hold her hand during the helicopter ride scene,” Dohwan had pointed out. He could distinctly remember how Lee Minho had giggled like a schoolgirl while Kim Goeun struggled to write long passages on his palm. He could also remember how uncomfortable it had made Baek Hyunjoo, who played Secretary Mo, to stare at them so closely. He guessed it wasn’t the handholding or the writing on the palm per se, but the unmistakable look of longing on Lee Minho’s face as he had repeatedly reached for Kim Goeun’s hand but had to hold it as Lee Gon.

“That doesn’t count,” was Minho’s petulant answer.

Woo Dohwan had shrugged. “Well, that is true. It doesn’t count,” he said and then carefully weighed his next few words against his friend’s receptiveness. “Maybe she’ll respond better if you stop scaring her? You can be too much sometimes, hyung.”

Lee Minho had crossed his arms across his chest, sat back and slouched deeper into the black leather couch. “Too much? I don’t think I'm doing enough if she doesn’t even look me in the eyes when we talk half the time! Have you seen me with her? I fold myself twice over just to be eye to eye with her.”

Woo Dohwan couldn’t help but wince. He had seen him do that more times than necessary. He sighed deeply, then took a huge gulp of his beer and set it down before clasping his hands in front of him. Alcohol made him braver. This was Lee Minho, a senior. But he was also a friend who needed his help, his honesty. And he was going to give it.

“Pyeha, I have seen your interviews,” he had begun gently, using the name affectionately to cushion his incoming litany, “and you are truly something else. You get asked what emotion her eyes are expressing during the press conference and you talk about how beautiful they are. She talks about enjoying putting handcuffs on you and you laugh like your mind just went into the gutter. In fact, you laugh at the most inopportune times.”

Woo Dohwan had been on a roll and he had months of observations he had kept to himself bubbling out of him.

“When she laughs, you laugh. That might be understandable. But only the two of you are laughing and the rest of us don’t really know what’s going on. When she makes a mistake introducing herself, you laugh. She answers a plain question, you laugh. Why? She just said she brushes her teeth and washes her face before bed. It's not even funny. Why did you have to laugh? She claps, you laugh. What is that? Pretty soon, the only thing she needs to do is breathe or walk and you will still find it the funniest thing in the world. That’s a little too intense, don’t you think?”

Lee Minho had narrowed his eyes at him and slowly draped himself across the table to look Woo Dohwan in the eyes. “No,” he said with an emphatic but very slow slam of a hand on the table. Then he had gestured to his face. “You know wasssat called? Is called haaappinesssh!”

Dohwan had smiled patiently at him. “Yes, but you’re scaring her with your happiness.”

At this, Minho had scoffed and said, “No, she's not scared. That woman doesn’t scare easily. I’ve seen her Instagram. I’ve looked her up on Naver. She does extreme sports on her spare time! You know what else Naver told me? She has a wall. Like Great Wall of China type of wall with all her co-stars!”

At this, he had seemed to deflate. “She doesn't like me,” he told Dowhan mournfully as he reached for his beer bottle to take a sip. The first one he had taken in the last 15 minutes that he had been talking, Dohwan noted. “I'm the only one who is happy when we’re together and it makes me sad. I want her to be happy too.”

Dohwan’s head had tipped to one side. “What do you mean by a wall?”

“She friendzones them.” He had looked like it had pained him to even say it out loud. “Like what she’s doing with me.”

Dohwan’s eyes had narrowed as he began rummaging through his pockets for his mobile phone. “How?”

Mildly irritated at Dohwan’s line of questioning but curious as to where it was leading, he had answered, “She’s there and we’re laughing and I know we’re okay. But if I try to get closer to her, like have a more personal and intimate conversation, she starts to joke around or change the subject. Kind of like with her hands, you know? They’re there within reach but still out of reach.”

“So, she doesn’t look like this?” Dohwan had opened his phone gallery and clicked on the folder under Squad Three. Then he set the phone down the table to face Minho and started swiping through all of the photos.

There was Kim Goeun with her arm linked through his own and her head on his shoulder. There was one of Kim Goeun with her arms around Kang Hongsuk and Kim Kyungnam that he had taken. Then there was a group selfie of all Squad Three members. More group selfies with Kim Yongji and himself, all with Kim Goeun in various states of playfulness the likes of which Lee Minho had never seen.

He had looked like he was about to cry. So he had taken his beer and gulped down the rest of it. And when he finished all of it, he slammed it down on the table and whipped out his cellphone. His fingers had fumbled and slipped but he managed to open his own gallery and showed it to Dohwan.

“No. Never. I’ve never seen her put her arms around me like she does with you or with Kim Kyungnam. Look at that! I can’t even shtake a popper picshure of ‘er, let albone a shelfie,” he said, his voice escalating as his words devolved. Then he had shaken his head to clear out the alcohol fog, which probably made it worse. “Maybe it’s coz Kyungnamz likes literaryture like she does. I should really read. More. I meant more. I knowz how to read. Now look at mah Goeun picturez!”

Woo Dohwan had looked in horror at the amount of blurred pictures of Kim Goeun that Lee Minho had in his cellphone. He had an especially large amount of it when they had been in Daegu. Squares and squares of orange, red, and yellows bursts from the maple trees at Jungri Sports Park were in his gallery and all of them had Kim Goeun at some corner of the frame, or on top, and at the bottom with just her forehead.

Lee Minho had sniffled and said, “I wuz pretending to take pishtures of the scenery all day. I did take a proper one though. The park, not her.” He then opened his Instagram account and showed Dohwan his post of Daegu last November. “I did manage to take a veeeeery short video of her from afar. Shee?”

He had shown Dohwan a short video of her sitting cross legged and swaying from side to side, lost in her own world, on a bench at Jungri Sports Park. He liked looking at it from time to time, more so at the end of a tough day.

This was borderline pathetic, thought Dohwan as he watched the most famous Korean actor of his time moon over a grainy, ultra zoomed, fancam quality video of Kim Goeun like he was an ordinary fangirl, happy with what little breadcrumb was thrown her way. It was almost as pathetic as watching Kim Goeun, the goddess of Korea National University of Arts, act like she didn’t deserve to be loved like this.

“Hyung, put that away please,” he had said and tried to get Minho to focus once more on his photos, the one with Kim Goeun standing between himself and Kim Kyungnam. “Look at this, do you notice anything different between your pictures of Goeunssi and mine?”

“She hates me. She likes you mowre,” he had answered glumly.

“Focus on the pictures!”

Minho had drawn back in surprise at his tone and Dohwan belatedly added, “…hyung.”

Lee Minho had glared first at the picture, then at Woo Dohwan. “She’s practically squished between all of the five, four, three and two of you! How’s this s’pposed to make me feel betterrrr? I’m the only one she puts up a wall with!”

Dohwan’s eyes had glinted. “Exactly. And that’s perfect.”

“What? Why? I dun wanna a wall!”

Dohwan had signaled to the waiter to bring them water. He had needed Lee Minho to be slightly sober for this to sink it.

“No, listen. There are two walls. This,” he had pointed to the picture in his phone, “is the Great Wall of Goeun, also known as The Friendzone, an impenetrable wall of cheerfulness and great friendship. This is the one that you read about. That,” he had pointed to Minho’s blurry pictures of Goeun, “is the Great Wall of China.”

Lee Minho had just kept on blinking at him. Very slowly. He really needed that water.

“Hyung, why do you think the Wall was built?”

“To…hold up the ceiling?”

A vein in Dohwan’s temple had threatened to pop. Maybe he didn’t phrase the question right to his drunk friend. “No, I meant, do you remember why the Great Wall of China was built?

“Oh! Okay, yeah! I saw Mulan. The Huns! To protect thems from the Huns,” Minho had said while nodding. Then he smiled when he remembered watching Goeun in “Memories of the Sword.”

“Yes, exactly. Well, they needed protection from the Xiongnu tribe, actually, who were the ancestors of the Huns, but okay. Huns would be correct. Now, why do you think they needed to keep out the Huns?”

“Coz...they’re afraid? Of the Huns?”

“Yes, obviously. But why else would they put up a wall?”

Lee Minho had begun tapping his fingers on the table as he pretended to think about it. Then the waiter finally arrived with their water. Woo Dohwan had sighed and waited until Minho had gulped down an entire glass of water before he answered his own question.

“If there's a wall, it means something is at risk, something that needs protecting.”

Minho had begun to nod slowly. “Owkaaay… What is it?”

“What do you think the Huns were after?”

“Mulan?”

“Hyung…No! Not the Disney Huns. The real ones! What do invading forces want to take first?”

“Ah. Um…the capital city of China? So, Beijing?”

“Yes! And what does the capital city of any country stand for?”

“I don’t get it… Goeunssi is China? Because…she speaks Chinese?”

“Dear god! No! What are you after? Just to hold her hands?”

“Yes!!! I mean no. I mean yes. I want to hold her hand. But not just her hand, all of her! Her whole body, but most of all her whole heart… oh. Oh! Her heart! Her heart is Beijing?”

Thank god for water, thought Woo Dohwan and he had said, “Yes!” with such visible relief that Lee Minho would have been offended had he seen it. But he hadn’t.

“So I'm the Hun?” He had looked crestfallen. “But I don’t want to be the Hun. I don’t want to hurt her.”

“You better not.”

Lee Minho’s head had whipped up at Woo Dohwan’s suddenly deathly serious tone. Dohwan had met his stare bravely. He had spent as much time with Kim Goeun as he had with Lee Minho. And as much as Minho had now become Pyeha to him, so had Kim Goeun become Noona to him, too.

“I won’t.”

Dohwan had nodded. “Right. Well, it’s not really you I’m worried about. Think about it. You’re both two huge stars with very protective fanbases. You know how vicious people can be, especially online. She knows it, too. All too well.”

“I know,” he had said with a voice like quiet steel while knobs and cogs turned in his head.

“Protect her, hyung. Protect her like she’s already yours to protect.”

Lee Minho had nodded, very much like Lee Gon at the moment. “I will.”

“Do you know what else this means?”

“Tell me.”

“Walls are a concrete manifestation of our fears,” Wo Dohwan had begun, speaking slowly, carefully, putting weight on each word. “so we build it around the one thing we know we could lose, and we build it against the people we know we could lose it to the most.”

Woo Dohwan’s words had worked in Lee Minho’s chest like Jeong Taeeul’s Magic Lily seeds in the place between 1 and 0. In a place where he thought nothing could survive, hope had bloomed.

“You know what else is great about the Great Wall of China?”

Lee Minho had shaken his head, still lightheaded from the Magic Lily that was taking root in the middle of his chest.

“It never worked,” Woo Dohwan had said with a devilish smile. “Northern tribes often ran around it, and the Manchurians broke through in 1644.”

Lee Minho had thrown his head back and laughed loudly. When his guffaws had died down, he just shook his head and sighed. “Ah, Dohwanssi, I don’t want to invade her. I just… I just want to be able to hold her hand and be allowed to never let it go.”

Woo Dohwan had smiled serenely at him then. “Even better.” And then they had toasted to it with their glasses of water, sober, but equally giddy.

This conversation became a constant loop in Lee Minho’s head the entire time he and Kim Goeun were shooting some scenes for the 9th and 11th episode. They were on a deserted countryside dirt road in Paju City with nothing but open fields on both sides. Overgrown weed browned by autumn flanked the dusty road and above it, nothing but the vast empty sky, uninterrupted by cityscapes. With this backdrop, the long shot of Lee Gon and Jeong Taeeul walking while arguing about the steak and rice Gon made for Koo Seoryong would look magnificent on screen, especially when filmed during golden hour.

But the last time he had filmed with Kim Goeun under the soft glow of a setting sun, he had forgotten his line. It wasn’t even one whole line. He just had to say Taeeul’s name. Even that, he had forgotten. So he had prepared himself for today’s shoot by wearing sunglasses. He figured that filtering that ethereal quality she took on under a sunset through his dark glasses would lessen its effect on him somehow.

Currently, his plan wasn’t working. She still looked to him like one of those angels painted on the side of temples or on an old scroll of ancient poetry. But he wasn’t the one having trouble with his lines today.

They had managed to shoot the first part of the scene where Gon and Taeeul talked about the possibility of him seeing Lee Jihun’s mother and seeing his own mother’s face. She had been her usual brilliant self in that scene, even if she had hit him a little too hard on his arm. He didn’t mind that. He had probably gotten used to her hitting his arm over the course of time that they had spent with each other. But he wasn’t used to the troubled look that started between her furrowed brows, to the stormy look in her eyes, and down to the pout in her lips that she was trying to chew off.

“Stop chewing your lip like that. There won’t be any of it left for the next episode,” he teased her, smiling at her like a naughty schoolboy. “You know we have that sad kissing scene coming up, and then the beheading—“

That earned him another hit on the arm. But she laughed, so it was worth it for him. They had been rehearsing the lines from Koo Seoryong’s steak and rice to Taeeul’s let’s live for today speech. Somewhere between those two points, Kim Goeun had gotten stuck and Lee Minho didn’t know how to help her. So he did the next best thing.

He tipped his head towards the empty end of the road and touched her elbow briefly. Then he said, “Let’s go for a walk and rehearse in quiet” and placed his hand on the small of her back, gently steering her forward and away from the crew for a bit. He often worked out the kinks in his scripts this way, walking around and around his house when he couldn’t figure out the appropriate delivery for a particular line. He had always been a very physical person so when he was stuck in a particularly hard spot, getting unstuck was both a mental and physical exercise.

He motioned to their director that they were going for a short break. Then she had shoved her script deep into the pocket of her gray coat and fell into step beside him as they both walked towards a slowly setting autumn sun.

He glanced down at her, wondering what else he could do for her. But Woo Dohwan’s words were still playing in a loop inside his head, cautioning him against being too much, too intense. So he let her be and told himself to be content with just staying beside her while she worked out the problem herself.

He listened to the steady hum of the wind around them. He listened to the rustle of the brittle tumbleweeds on either side of them. He listened to the crunch of his boots and the muffled footfalls of her sneakers on the dirt road. He listened to anything so he could drown out the need inside him to just hold her hand and offer to destroy anything that was making her this sad. He tightened his grip on Lee Gon’s riding crop to prevent his hands from straying.

After a while, she mused, “It must be nice to be Jeong Taeeul.”

That perplexed him a bit. “How so?” He couldn’t imagine a world where Kim Goeun would be envious of Jeong Taeeul.

He watched her kick a pebble out of her way before pouting prettily when it bounced only a few inches away

“Just her fearlessness,” she murmured, looking down at her feet “she’s not afraid to get hurt, not afraid of uncertainty.”

She had begun chewing on her bottom lip at the end of her sentence and it was beginning to drive him a little crazy. So he reached for her chin and gave it a little pinch to get her to stop. That earned him more swats on the arm. At this point,

“Stop that,” he said, “she’s not half the woman you are.”

She rolled her eyes at him and snorted for full effect. “You don’t even know me enough to say that!” she had cried witheringly while giving him an incredulous look.

He stopped walking and turned his face up to the sky, grateful for the comfort of his dark sunglasses. He was almost laughing at himself and how ridiculous it was to be standing next to the woman he had been looking up in the internet since the 2015 Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, and have her accuse him of not knowing anything about her. He wanted to bet he could name all the awards she had won, been nominated for, and the project attached to those, in chronological order and his list would be more accurate than hers. But that would be, in Woo Dohwan’s words, “too much, too intense.”

So he just turned his body at a slight angle to face hers and said, “Jeong Taeeul isn’t completely fearless, remember? She refused to believe me for 4 and a half episodes.”

“No sane person would!”

He pretended to be offended before scoffing and said, “It’s because she’s incapable of taking a leap of faith. She always has to have solid ground to stand on with everything she does.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “And what makes you think I can take a leap of faith?”

He surprised himself by actually answering her question without thinking about how it would make him look like a creep who had been looking her up in Naver and poring over her Instagram feed.

He held one hand up and started ticking things off. “You have stood at the very edge of a cliff in Grand Canyon. You’ve gone skydiving in Australia! And then went bungee jumping. You’ve gone scuba diving in the Philippines, too. They have the bluest waters, don’t they? That was a really good choice.”

Kim Goeun looked at him like he was exactly that creep who had been looking her up in Naver and poring over her Instagram feed. He didn’t care though. All he cared about was that she sounded like she thought she wasn’t worth enough to play Lt. Jeong Taeeul— which was ridiculous. And he needed to prove it to her.

He took off his shades, then bent his head to look at her squarely in the eyes, as he had done so countless of times when he really needed her to pay attention to him, and stated, “Something tells me that a person who can do all of that won’t have any problems taking a leap of faith.”

Then he straightened up and smiled at her. He imagined how she would look like if she tried all the extreme watersports he usually enjoyed doing on his off time. She would love it, he just knew. She was probably the kind who screamed out of joy instead of fear when faced with jumping off planes or diving into deep waters. It was exactly that kind of spirit that had her jumping into the role of Eungyo without any kind of formal experience in film— and then leaving it all behind to go in hiatus for school. That was, to him, the bravest thing she ever did. Lt. Jeong TaeEul may know hot to handle a gun but Kim Goeun could handle so much more than just that.

The autumn sun blazed on above them as he looked at Kim Goeun wrestle with whatever little goblin had hijacked her head for a bit. Watching her act had been one of the greatest pleasures of his life. But watching the naked emotions, her real ones, play out on her face was, in fact, a very strong frontrunner for being the greatest pleasure of his life. He realized that this was the closest he had ever been to her, the most intimate. And he didn't even have to hold her hand. He should be content with just this, he told himself.

But then he would be proven wrong, only seconds later. The greatest pleasure in his life came on this moment when the autumn sun sank the slowest, and Kim Goeun’s soft, small hand wrapped around his for the first time.

Once more, he was hit with the sound of the ocean roaring in his ears. Except this time, she wasn’t Jeong Taeeul telling Lee Gon she loved him and he had a few glorious moments when he could pretend it was real.

This time, they were just Lee Minho and Kim Goeun and she was looking up at him with bright, clear eyes as she said, “Let’s go back. I think I’ve got it now,” and the hand that was tugging him forward was very warm, very real.

“Let’s go, Mr. Dog Poop!”

Lee Minho tightened his hand around hers, afraid of letting it slip away so soon. But when her hand shifted so she could press it closer, tighter around his, he felt his chest tightening, as if it couldn’t contain his quickly blooming heart.

But Woo Dohwan’s words were still in a loop inside his head even after their shoot at Paju had ended and he had to transfer to Busan for the upcoming Kingdom of Corea scenes.

_Protect her like she’s already yours to protect._

Lost in thought as he and his staff drove to Busan, Lee Minho was suddenly brought out of his reverie by his manager, Jang Yonghoon.

“I took some behind the scenes photos of you today and sent some back to MYM,” he said whole holding out a Samsung tablet and Minho nodded at him absentmindedly.

“You might want to take a look at some of it.”

At Manager Jang’s quiet but insistent tone, Lee Minho then took the tablet, his curiosity piqued.

It was a picture of him and Kim Goeun with their backs to the camera, his body in what had seemed to be its natural state these days, tilted towards her, always to her, his eyes on her, unwavering, and her, unaware of everything except for the worry that Jeong Taeeul’s bravery was unreachable to her and the fact that the sun was setting soon.

But the sun didn’t. It had hung in the autumn sky and waited and waited until Kim Goeun decided to hold on to his hand for the first time.

Lee Minho closed his eyes and dropped his head back as he handed the tablet back to his manager.

“Please. Send that one to my phone,” he whispered.

In his mind, the glow of that day had stayed within that picture in his phone and it had kept him warm throughout the days in Busan when he had to shoot scenes without her. He kept it in his pocket and it had kept him warm as he stood on the craggy rocks on the shores of Busan with Jeon Musong who played his uncle, Prince Buyeong. It had kept him warm as the seawater battened endlessly against the huge unmovable rocks.

But then, when he said, “ _Uncle, do you believe in fate_?” it was as if the sunset in his pocket had touched tinder.

_“People usually tell fate to move aside and challenge it. Should I fight against it?”_

Then the tinder sparked into fire and Jeon Musong gave him the words that made it blaze into a raging bonfire in his heart.

“ _You can never know what will happen in life. But if there is a place you want to reach, even if your life may be at risk, that is fate. The footsteps you take by risking your whole life is what’s fate.”_

_“Is there a place you want to reach?”_

And now here he was, four and a half hours later, pulling up into the underground garage of MYM Entertainment, speeding up through the floors to reach the top to his sister’s office as the endless loop of Woo Dohwan’s words, the sunsets of Paju, water and rocks of Busan, and Prince Buyeong’s words played in his mind.

He found his sister waiting for him in her nearly deserted office with the window shades drawn up to let in the glittering city lights of Gangnam-gu. Her smile was watery when she saw him. He made his way to her desk but she had taken his hands and led him to the couch by the glass window.

“It was that urgent, huh?” she teased him, her voice soft as they both sat.

Lee Minho swallowed the lump in his throat as he nodded. Now that he was here he was suddenly overcome with the magnanimity of the decision he was about to make. With nearly two decades in the business, and four years in his sister’s agency, he had always prided himself on being a humble, hardworking, and undemanding actor.

_Protect her like she’s already yours to protect._

But this time, it was different.

“Noona, I have to ask you for something—“

“I know. I knew as soon as I saw the picture.”

Lee Minho looked at his sister in wonder and gratitude. Then, he laughed, embarrassed at how much his sister knew about him that she could suss him out by just one picture.

“You saw it, huh?”

Lee Yunjeong nodded at her younger brother, her eyes tender. She hadn’t realized how much he had grown up until now.

“How? It was just—“

“Your backs?”

He nodded.

She smiled tremulously at him and said, “Do you remember when we used to take family vacations?”

“Yeah?”

“You walk with Omma, always, while I walked with Appa. We always walked behind you and Omma.” Lee Yunjeong felt tears gather in the corner of her eyes as she reached out to touch her baby brother’s cheek. “I know what your back looks like when you walk with someone you love.”

Lee Minho was stunned into silence.

“So tell me, Minhossi, what do you need?”

_Protect her like she’s already yours to protect._


	5. And So, She Decided to Be Brave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kim Goeun counts all the times she stayed a universe away even when she was in his arms, and the one time she finally makes a quantum leap.

It was a game she played with herself. Which man was hugging her, Lee Gon or Lee Minho? She had learned how to categorize which man was holding her by the little things he did which she wasn’t sure he was even aware of.

The first time she felt the difference was in Gwanghwamun Square. He was mechanical during rehearsal, telling her in very exact terms where his arms and hands would be and how tight, how long, he would hold her. His limbs also had the capacity to land unerringly in the same place they had been 2 or 3 takes ago, so the shots, even during practice, were always seamless. He was also very still, immovable as a statue. When he had held her like that, in such precise, unchanging fashion, it was easy for her to switch on TaeEul.

That’s why it threw her a bit when, during the actual shoot, his hug had changed.

Their assistants had just taken the bulky puffer jackets from them when they both let out matching whooshes of breath and subsequent shivers. Then they had snapped into position as per their rehearsal. But when he took her in his arms, in what was probably the 8th time that night, he suddenly swayed. Just a slight, gentle, rocking motion on the balls of his feet.

It wasn’t a Lee Gon thing to do, so she had filed it under Lee Minho’s List of Random Acts During Hugs. She didn’t know what to make of it.

“Should I push?”

The swaying stopped.

“Not yet.”

A few seconds ticked by and they remained as motionless as the statue of Admiral Yi Sunshin towering above them. He was back to Lee Gon, she thought.

“Should I push now?”

“Are you still cold?”

So startled by the question, she didn’t even think to lie. She thought about it, really thought about it— with her face tucked into his chest, shoulders and back covered by his arms and hands, she was quite…warm.

“No.”

“Okay, push me.”

So she had pushed him away from her, along with the idea that he had prolonged their hug because he thought she was still cold.

The second time Lee Gon hugged Jeong Taeeul was in the 6th episode. Lee Minho had stood in the middle of the yard of the Hero Taekwondo Center at Chungju like a marble version of himself. Cold, immobile under the warm yellow lights scattered about in the yard, feet together, hands behind his back, no doubt clasped around his riding crop, and spine so straight and tall— it was undoubtedly Lee Gon. That’s why she had no qualms about Taeeul barreling straight into him like a bullet out of a gun. She liked that he always managed to catch her without being bowled over for all the 5 times she had to do it.

He had been instructed to press his cheek into the back of her head and to smooth down her hair in a soothing motion. And he had done so, perfectly well for all 4 times. But on their last take, she had felt him break out of Lee Gon’s granite stillness when he spread out his fingers, almost burying them in her hair, and completely cupping the back of her head. He used them to press his cheek to her just a little bit closer than before. 

Then she remembered thinking that Lee Minho had nice, large, and warm hands before her eyes had drifted close. It was too late before she realized what she, Kim Goeun, had done— that it was her who had nuzzled deeper into Lee Minho’s chest and had felt so contented, she had closed her eyes. Not Jeong Taeeul.

She didn’t know whether she was relieved or disappointed when the director had yelled cut. She wasn’t really ready for the answer, nor to even ask the question again. Weeks later, she found out that the last take hadn’t made the cut at all and she was strangely pleased. It had been a private moment, something she wasn’t ready to confront but not quite ready to let go of just yet.

So on the third time Lee Gon hugged Jeong Taeeul when they were at Misa Lake Park for the 9th episode, Kim Goeun had resolutely kept her eyes open during their embrace. She avoided nuzzling into his chest by twisting her body and reaching up to rest her chin on his shoulder. And it didn’t matter that Jeong Taeeul was giving in to a rare moment of weakness at that time, hanging on to Lee Gon and worrying if he’ll be able to get back to Taeeul as fast as he said he would.

She gave Taeeul her tears, letting them brim and spill over, but Kim Goeun wasn’t going to close her eyes. Even when his arms had closed around her as if he alone could prevent any sadness from touching her, she had kept her eyes open. Even when she felt him cup the back of her head with his large, warm hand, she had kept her eyes open.

Not even when she felt it— the minute movement of his thumb, rubbing into her hair in soothing side-to-side motions. He had been doing that a lot more recently. His thumb sweeping over her knuckles at the BBQ Olive Chicken in Hyeonam, over her left arm as he squeezed her closer to his side while they walked along Songdo Central Park carrying the huge stuffed Minomi, and here too at Misa Lake Park, his thumb had swept over the backs of her fingers when he enclosed her hand between both of his. And now, through the tangle of her hair caught inside his embrace, she could feel the sweet gentle touch of his thumb caressing the back of her head.

Even then, she had kept her eyes open. But it had the pleasant effect of calming her down, both Taeeul’s tears and her own fear of closing her eyes whenever Lee Minho’s arms surrounded her.

And there it was, finally, the acknowledgement that she was terrified to see what she would if she closed her eyes once more. At this, she let loose Taeeul’s tears and maybe, just maybe, added her own fears into them.

She thought she could use this newfound fear to fuel Jeong Taeeul’s lines for episodes 9 and 11. But she was currently having a hard time aligning hers and Taeeul’s fears.

They were losing light fast. She had known that. They were on location on a vast empty field in Gyeonggi-do, Paju City, with nothing but fall browned grass and tumbleweed on either side of a dirt road. The sun hung golden in the afternoon sky, for now.

They were supposed to be shooting the “We’ll only live today” scene but she couldn’t quite get a handle on Taeeul’s state of mind.

_What are you thinking of, Jeong Taeeul? You’re supposed to be a pragmatist._

Kim Goeun was fine with everything in the dialogue until they had to shift into a long shot of Taeeul and Gon while they walked down the road, arguing about whether he had made steak and rice for Koo Seoryong or not. She could play the subtly jealous girlfriend well. She also understood “ _If I say no, will I never see you again?_ ” because that was fear and insecurity. She also understood “ _Not today_ ” because that was hesitation based on fear.

But the rest was a blank for her. If Taeeul was so afraid of the uncertainty of their future together, shouldn’t she want to secure it first instead jumping all in and just living for each day?

_When did you change, Jeong Taeeul? You fall in love and suddenly you’re willing to risk it all just to hold his hand for one long day?_

She was getting frustrated.

“Stop chewing your lip like that,” Lee Minho’s gravelly voice interrupted her inner rant, “there won’t be any of it left for the next episode.” Then he broke out one of his teasing smiles, the one that popped out the dimple on his left cheek.

“You know we have that sad kissing scene coming up, and then the beheading--”

She knew what scene he was about to bring up so she lightly hit him on his arm to get him to shut up. Despite being cranky because of the difficult scene up ahead, Kim Goeun laughed and shook her head at his attempt to shake her out of her mood. He smiled softly at her laughter. Then he tipped his head towards the empty end of the road and touched her elbow briefly.

“Let’s go for a walk and rehearse in quiet,” he said and placed his hand on the small of her back, gently steering her forward and away from the crew for a bit.

A short break would do her good, she thought. Heaving a huge sigh, she tucked her script into the pocket of her light gray coat and fell into a step beside him as they both walked towards a slowly setting autumn sun.

_Hey Jeong Taeeul, is it really that easy? Just close your eyes, take his hand, and fall even if you’re not sure about the future?_

She felt his gaze on her but didn’t say anything. They walked in companionable silence for a while. There was nothing but the crunch of his boots, the muffled footfalls of her sneakers on the dirt road, and all the mutterings of her heart.

After a while, she mused, “It must be nice to be Jeong Taeeul.”

“How so?”

She kicked a pebble out of her way.

“Just her fearlessness,” she murmured, looking down at her feet “she’s not afraid to take risks.”

“Stop that.”

She felt him pinch her chin between his thumb and forefinger. She laughed and swatted his hand away. She didn’t even realize she had been chewing on her bottom lip again until he had pointed it out.

“She’s not half the woman you are.”

Kim Goeun rolled her eyes at him and gave him a little snort as an exclamation point. That was laying it on a bit thick. “You don’t even know me enough to say that!” she cried witheringly while giving him an incredulous look.

Lee Minho stopped walking and sighed up to the heavens. Then he turned his body at a slight angle to face hers and said, “Jeong Taeeul isn’t completely fearless, remember? She refused to believe me for 4 and a half episodes.”

“No sane person would!”

He pretended to be offended before scoffing and said, “It’s because she’s incapable of taking a leap of faith. She always has to have solid ground to stand on with everything she does. ”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “And what makes you think I can take a leap of faith?”

It was his turn to look incredulous. He held one hand up and started ticking things off. “You have stood at the very edge of a cliff in Grand Canyon. You’ve gone skydiving in Australia! And then went bungee jumping. You’ve gone scuba diving in the Philippines, too. They have the bluest waters, don’t they? That was a really good choice.”

Kim Goeun stared at him, dumbfounded.

He took off his dark sunglasses, then bent his head to look at her squarely in the eyes, an action so familiar to her now, and stated, “Something tells me that a person who can do all of that won’t have any problems taking a leap of faith.” Then he straightened up and gave her a smile like he was proud of her. No dimples this time, just a slightly tilted head, softness and open admiration in the crinkles around his eyes.

She looked up at him in surprise, and then wonder. He was looking at her but she felt like she was looking at herself, the way he saw her. The real her.

She was the kind of girl who leapt into nothingness with her eyes closed and relished the rush of uncertainty. And she didn’t even need to be in love to find that kind of bravery. She was that girl, even before she met Lee Minho.

How could she forget those things about her self? What was she so afraid of anyway— closing her eyes and what, falling? If there was anything that skydiving and scuba diving taught her, it would be when air runs out, your feet would soon touch the ground, and you would need to resurface to breathe again.

_I’ll be okay, Jeong Taeeul. You jumped without knowing where you would land. At least, I know where I’m landing._

The autumn sun blazed on above them as Kim Goeun stared ahead into the open dirt road. Lee Minho had just reminded her that she wasn’t the kind of girl who falls. Kim Goeun was the kind who leapt. And so, on this day when the autumn sun sank the slowest, as afraid to cross the horizon as she had been to cross the invisible line she had drawn between herself and Lee Minho, Kim Goeun decided that she has had enough of horizons and other invisible lines bisecting her world. Without waiting for the sun to fall, she went ahead and decided to leap.

She wrapped her small hand around his large one, looked up at him with eyes bright and clear and said, “Let’s go back. I think I’ve got it now.”

_Jeong Taeeul, was it the same way for you when you took Lee Gon’s hand today? Did it feel like flying?_

Then she laughed easily and began to jog forward, tugging insistently on his hand as she dragged him back to the film crew. When the wind blew her hair up and all around her face, she giggled and picked up her pace. There was a lightness to her now.

“Let’s go, Mr. Dog Poop!”

And Lee Minho just held on tight to her hand and let her lead him to wherever she wanted.

“By the way, how do you know about the skydiving and stuff?”

He shoved his sunglasses back on his face and answered, “I’ve answered all your questions until now and I will continue to do so. Except for that question you just asked.”

The line was Lee Gon’s but the slightly embarrassed smile was Lee Minho’s. So she let it go but held on to his hand just a little bit tighter as they walked back to the crew. She really only had this moment with him. Until the next month. And the next. Until May, when it all ends and he realizes that a little romance on the side wasn’t worth sacrificing his career over, and she has to resurface from this dream, and touch her feet to the ground once more. But until then, she was going to hold on to this.

_I kind of get you now, Jeong Taeeul._

And so, on the fourth time that Lee Gon grabbed Jeong Taeeul for a fierce hug on that dirt road while he waited for her answer to his proposal, Kim Goeun’s “I’m going to punch you” had more softness to it instead of Taeeul’s usual bluster. And when she had to draw back to tell him, “Not today” she made sure to clasp her hands behind him to keep herself anchored to his body, so that Lee Minho would understand that she, Kim Goeun, was his to hold for now.

Later on after May, she would no doubt try to sift through her memories and try and figure out where hers ended and Taeeul’s began. But for now, she just wanted to be able to run into his arms and let him do whatever random thing he wanted to do.

Like now, at the Ahopsan Bamboo Forest in Busan late at night in the middle of rehearsal, Lee Minho was his usual mechanized self as he barked instructions for the logistics of their running reunion hug but he had a look on his face that told her he was up to something.

“I will get off Maximus as you walk over to me.”

“And?”

He immediately crouched his body, poised to run. “I’ll get off and run to you,” he said, already in the middle of his hysterical slightly asthmatic laughter, “Ready?”

She couldn’t help it. She didn’t even try, actually. She just gave in to the laughter bubbling up inside her and began to run and hop over to him the moment he sprang into a sprint. It was almost embarrassing how their laughter echoed through the bamboo forest, surrounded as they were by crew members setting up lights and sound for the shoot. But when he looked at her like that, with a smile so wide it popped his cheeks and reached his eyes and his large body was hurtling itself at her only to stop midway, with slightly bent knees and arms outstretched while waiting for her, it only seemed natural for her launch herself at him, her small body fitting so nicely into the pockets of space he had created in his body especially for her.

She pretended to cry of course, for Taeeul’s sake, as this hug was supposed to be devastating for her. But Kim Goeun couldn’t deny the fact that Taeeul’s first sad hug was also the happiest of all hugs that she had ever had from Lee Minho. So she sank into this fifth hug, and sixth, and seventh, and eighth, and ninth, and finally, the tenth hug during rehearsal as they tried to find the most natural looking way to do it.

But if she had to pick a favorite hug during rehearsal, it would be the seventh one. She had run up to him from the higher part of the inclined footpath so his broad shoulders, normally out of reach when on level ground, were finally accessible to her. He had noticed this and suggested, “I think you can jump a little bit.”

He then took her hands and placed them on his shoulders while his hands went to her waist. Then he smirked at her and said, “Remember when I had to carry you up onto Maximus for episode 4?”

She narrowed her eyes at him playfully and hit him on the arm. “You better carry me this time,” she admonished, “and don’t drop me!”

“Never.” Gone was the boyish smirk. In its place was his soft smile that had always seemed to be reserved for her.

Her heart had fluttered like dragonfly wings, delicate and fast.

Then she jumped up and he caught her easily around her torso. He lifted her up, light as the moonbeam through the bamboo forest, and her arms locked behind his neck. And for a few starlit moments, her feet hung suspended in the air as she clung to him. She wiggled her feet, enjoying the feel of being carried in his arms and she allowed herself a secret smile, hiding her face on the crook of his neck and shoulder.

_I’m sorry Jeong Taeeul. I know your heart was breaking here, but this is the happiest I’ve ever been in a long time._

On their eleventh and twelfth hug for the night during the actual take, Maximus interrupted them and brought her all the way back to Gwanghwamun Square during their first months of shooting. That was when she had begun dissecting his hugs and classifying them under Lee Minho or Lee Gon. She realized now, on their way to their thirteenth hug, that she had stopped guessing whether it was Lee Minho or Lee Gon. He was both to her now and she thinks her heart is big enough for both of them.

Maybe that was why she had thrown her arms around him a little bit fiercer than usual on their thirteenth hug that night.

“Cut!”

They had broken apart to see what the NG was about, but Lee Minho kept his hands around her arms, as if refusing to let hug end. Their director had laughed as he made his way towards them, pointing at the two of them.

“Taeeul’s hair flew up like that because you hugged so tight!”

Apparently, the impact of her body colliding with his had thrown her hair over his shoulder in an unattractive, messy manner. They had laughed it off, of course. So had she.

But she made a mental to note to stay her heart, telling it to rest a little bit, and apologized once more to the saddened Jeong TaeEul. Kim Goeun wasn’t supposed to be so buoyantly happy tonight so she had taken her dragonfly wing heart and put it inside a box for now. Jeong TaeEul had to wander into a dark bamboo forest now, not knowing if she was waiting for Lee Gon, or just an empty bamboo forest.

The fourteenth time their arms had entwined with each other was for Lee Gon and Jeong Taeeul, who weren’t fortunate enough to live in the same world and had to fight against fate and time to be together.

_Are you really here?_

Kim Goeun’s hands desperately clutching at Lee Minho’s brown coat, searching for anything to anchor him to her, was for Taeeul, who had probably never needed anyone before Lee Gon.

_Not yet. Not entirely. I missed you so much. I missed you like crazy. So I was just going to listen to your voice and leave._

Lee Minho’s voice, thick with longing and remorse, were for Lee Gon, who had always felt powerless when it came to protecting his loved ones from pain, so he had contented himself with any bone of affection thrown his way, believing he did not deserve it.

_My voice?_

Kim Goeun’s voice was small and unsteady as she looked up at Lee Minho’s face like she was trying to memorize it— they were for Jeong Taeeul who probably felt like she was losing Lee Gon for every minute that passed.

_I was going to call you from that payphone over there._

Lee Minho’s thumb sweeping repeatedly over Kim Goeun’s cheek was for Lee Gon, who had probably meant it as a way to comfort Taeeul by wiping her tears away, and to assure himself that she was still there, and still his.

But on the fifteenth time that their bodies had locked around each other, Lee Minho’s fingers on his left hand had buried themselves in her hair and his thumb had begun brushing back the fine hairs on her temple. And Kim Goeun couldn’t help but reach up, her fingers drifting over the back of his hand to close around his errant thumb that was making her feel all kinds of things.

He escaped her hold on his thumb and slid deeper into her hair until his large warm hand was now cupping the back of her head and suddenly, her dragonfly winged heart fluttered to life once more. When she felt him begin to nuzzle the side of her head with his nose until his face was all but buried in her hair, she felt her dragonfly bloom out of her chest and out into the night. And when Lee Minho began to sway, ever so gently, as if they were two slow dancing moonbeams hidden in the bamboo forest, Kim Goeun found herself pressing closer to his chest once more. A sigh of contentment escaped her lips while her eyes drifted close.

_Jeong Taeeul, you always knew, didn’t you— that the safest place in the universe will always be in his arms?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to add that this chapter is dedicated to my friend, Gayle. I had her on my mind when I was writing this and I wish for her to find the courage to be ready to make this kind of leap someday. That is all! ^_^


	6. If Today Is The Only Day We Are Allowed To Be Scandalous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They count all their kisses and the one time that it mattered.

Lee Minho was a creature of habit. Every day, he would sleep at exactly 10 in the evening and wake up at 6 in the morning whether it was a full or half day’s schedule. But during the rare few days between projects and media engagements, he could sleep for almost the entire day. While filming for a project, this would often have to shift to when he could actually get some sleep, whether it was 10pm or 3am. But he would stretch that out as much as he can without disrupting everyone’s schedule. 

Nighttime was to him, a time for eking out all the sleep he could get for the whole day. Needless to say, Lee Minho was not a nocturnal creature.

Kim Goeun was not a creature of habit. In the same way that she builds her playlists on Spotify by going for Kim Soo-Cheol’s modernized traditional music to rock bands like Sinawe and then swerving to soundtracks of Hollywood movies like “A Star Is Born,” she would run her days pretty much the same way. Schedules were followed, of course. But if there were none, she could while the day away with music, movies, a random trip to the nearest _noraebang_ by herself or with her friends— whatever she felt like at the moment. While filming for a project, she would be subjected to a set routine. It would throw off her system that was much used to spontaneity that it often led to creative bursts of energy as well as finding sleep, at odd hours.

Nighttime was to her, a time of gamble of sorts between restlessness and sleep. Needless to say, Kim Goeun might very well be a nocturnal creature.

This was why they worked so well together. When one wanes in energy, the other one waxes and shines enough light to sustain both of them. And then, there were the prime hours between 7-10 in the evening and 12 midnight to 3 in the morning when their opposite energies would align for a few short hours.

On a cool winter night around early December, they found themselves in one of those prime hours at the haven for historical drama sets at Yongin Daejanggeum Park, hashing out strategies for Lee Gon and Jeong Taeeul’s first kiss.

He drops his head onto her shoulder and he feels like he’s falling. Just sideways.

“My body should be higher than this,” she says as she moves closer to him and tries sitting up straighter. “Isn’t it uncomfortable for you?”

He thinks it’s ridiculous that she thinks he would ever be uncomfortable any time he had a chance to touch her— even if it was just his head on her shoulder. He would bend his neck at any angle if it meant he could be closer to her.

“It feels like I’m lowering my head endlessly,” he teases her as he repeatedly bops his head sideways onto her shoulder, which seemed perpetually out of reach.

“Pfft!”

She flips her hair out of the way and tries once more to sit up while elongating her spine. She glances at her shoulder, then at him, with narrowed eyes.

“I’m 5 feet and 6 inches tall, you know. I am not small.”

He tries to swallow a guffaw, and fails. “I didn’t say anything!”

She rolls her eyes at him and then nudges him with her shoulder. “Come on, be serious. We have to fix this.”

“Do you want to sit on a pillow?”

She makes a face at him and he tries hard not to smile at her by folding his lips inward. He gives teasing her a break and starts looking for a way to make their scene look less awkward.

He looks at the space between their misaligned shoulders, arms, thighs, and knees and wonders how their significant height difference never mattered when they were standing. Their bodies always fit, somehow. But now that they were sitting down, their angles, lines, and corners almost seem skewed. And he didn’t like it.

“You’re too far away.”

She looks at him, then at the space between, and moves closer to him to remove the gap. “How does that make me any taller?” she asks, confused.

He looks at the gentle slope that starts from her shoulder and goes up to her neck. He brushes away some of her hair that had fallen over her shoulder. Then he touches the collar of her coat and tells her, “This part right here is higher. If I put my head here, I think it will be more doable.”

Then he pats her knee, the one that’s flush against his outer thigh. “When I pull you down after you try to get up, make sure that your knee is aligned with mine. Don’t move backward so I can stay a little bit behind you. That way I just have to move my head forward and sideways to reach you comfortably.”

She nods at him, amazed once more at his ability to figure out mass and space.

They decide to give it a try.

_You believe everything I say now._

Then he pulls her down like he said he would and she positions herself like he said she should. So when he bends his body towards hers, his head finally finds the gentle curve between her neck and shoulder. He closes his eyes and the smile he gives the camera echoes the sigh in his mind when their angles, lines and corners finally aligned. They fit together, once more.

But then they had to do the same for their lips, for Lee Gon and Jeong Taeeul’s first kiss.

Now, Lee Minho thinks a kiss is all about angles and he tries to move his head this way and that, careful to avoid poking her cheek with his sharp nose. That’s how he has always done it, anyway. So they try it once. But because every kiss is different for Kim Goeun, she wants to see how this one would look like before she could think of putting in her two cents.

_“Do we have to be sitting like this?”_

He says this and moves towards her, lightning quick, and she ends up laughing before he could even kiss her. Their characters were in their 30s and here they both were, about to kiss like impatient teenagers.

“I’m sorry,” she says to him, laughing while he shook her shoulder in playful rebuke. “You feel it, right? Something’s wrong with this kiss.”

Then she shakes a graceful pointer finger at him and adds, “That’s why your cheeks popped. You were about to laugh too!”

He laughs ruefully and tips his head to one side. “I really don’t like the line that I say before I kiss you. I feel like a whiny teenage boy.”

So they ask the director to be given more leeway for their first kiss and PD Baek Sang Hoon, who looks at his watch that says 7:48pm, gives it.

Kim Goeun turns to Lee Minho, eyes sharp and mind racing, and says, “Before you kiss her, Taeeul was baiting you and insinuating that you had no experience in kissing or dating.”

Her eyes meet his. Like the moon and the rising tide, his blood stirs and soon, his intensity matches hers. “Right. Lee Gon won’t stand for that. He won’t whine. He will try to prove you wrong, draw you up a solution on the board if he needs to.”

“Yes! You will challenge me.”

“How about if he says to you… Should I kiss you to you prove it?“

She tries it out for sound and shakes her head, “She’ll say no, on instinct.”

“I can’t tell you what I’m about to do—“

“But you have to give me an idea that you’re about to—“

“Should I have done this instead?” he says and moves to hold her head in place once more for an imaginary kiss. “How’s that?”

“Go slow.”

He finds her slender, tapered fingers clutching the cuffs of his dark blue velvet robe.

She pushes his forearms back without touching him, and he watches as she pulls his arms towards her at an unhurried pace.

“Go slow,” she repeats and says, “You’re patient with me because you believe our fates are intertwined so you don’t need to rush into this kiss” because Kim Goeun is beginning to think that this kiss is really about what happens before and after the kiss.

“Where do you want my hands?”

“Keep them here to hold me still,” she says as she positions his hands by the cuff of his sleeves on either side of her face. “You probably have control issues. With treason and everything.”

That elicits a laugh from him and she gives him a quick smile.

“I can’t block your face from the camera though.”

She nods at this and lets go of his sleeves. He forces his hands to stay still and not chase after hers.

Then her eyes take on a curious glint.

“Do you think it’s true that Lee Gon doesn’t have any experience at all?”

“Hah! I think it’s true,” he smiles fondly at the thought of young Lee Gon and continues, “He doesn’t have enough room in his heart for anyone except Jeong Taeeul. It’s been like that since he was eight.”

“Jeong Taeeul is the same, I think. She single-mindedly pursues things, like taekwondo and being a cop, that she won’t have time for anything else.”

“So…youthful innocence at their 30’s?”

They both laugh at the difficult paradox the situation presented. Then she shakes her head and tries to focus once more.

“I think maybe that’s why Taeeul is so brusque and awkward around Lee Gon. She’s never been in a relationship. She only knows martial arts and chasing bad guys. It’s her first time to experience this attraction. She doesn’t know how else to initiate a kiss or any form of intimacy except to challenge and provoke him.”

He watches her punctuate each pause between sentences with a little gnaw on her bottom lip as her words rushed to catch up to her racing mind. He watches how she purses her lips and then sucks her plump bottom lip back into her mouth. A flash of white peeks as her front teeth trouble the reddening flesh of her small, but full mouth.

“She could have just asked, like a normal person would,” she quipped.

“Would you have?”

His sudden question surprises both of them but both manage to hide it. She laughs it off but her eyes looking away for a second and the slight brittleness to her voice betrays her when she answers, “No! I don’t think I ever did or could even ask. But Jeong Taeeul could have, if she had any experience.”

He nods his assent and shifts his gaze away from her face, needing to concentrate. And then, it becomes her turn to watch him. She does not watch him the way he watches her because she cannot zero in on one particular aspect of his face. Contrary to popular belief, she does not spend much time just staring at his nose.

“I think Lee Gon will just take a kiss, but he will be as considerate as he can be. He only knows mathematics, science, and being a King, so he probably won’t ask for a kiss, either,” he says almost to himself.

What she likes about his high bridged nose is that if she followed it down, it felt a lot like hanging from a cliff’s edge and letting go, and then getting caught on his cupid bow and landing softly on the pillow of his bottom lip. Afterwards, her gaze would clamber down the edge of his lips and make its slow steady climb from his strong chin, across his well-defined jaw to where it curves its way up to his ear, swings to his fringe, casually and tantalizingly brushing over his forehead, eyebrows and those deep-set brown eyes. And back again to his tall, sharp nose. She delighted in the fact that she could choose to go down the same route once more, or go in reverse, but his nose was always her kilometer zero.

He turns his head to face her and asks, “Do you want to give it a try?”

She blinks, nearly caught staring, and nods quickly at him.

_Should I have done this?_

This time, when he turns to her and reaches out to touch her face, his hands are slower, but they did not anticipate how his large hand would nearly cover her entire face as he pulls her in for a kiss. He angles his head to his left and slots the tip of his nose on that sweet spot above her cheekbone right before it slopes down the curve of her cheek. A small intake of breath later, he touches his lips to hers.

He stays there, lips locked onto hers, unmoving, for a few heartbeats, breathing through their noses as if underwater. They were, both of them, old hands at this game.

Then, they part.

They check their work on the small handheld monitor and he automatically hands over one of the earpieces. He had learned long ago, on their first shoot at Gwanghwamun Square, how she did not like her ear being touched when he had tried to put in her earpiece for her.

She scoots closer to him, shoulders and arms almost touching but not quite, as he tilts the monitor towards her. Her assistants hand her coffee in her white and brown tumbler and she takes sips from it as they watch Lee Gon and Jeong TaeEul kiss for the first time.

She starts laughing softly and asks him, “Do you kiss with your eyes open?”

He pauses the monitor to give her a mock dirty look. “No! I was being considerate! I didn’t want to poke a hole through your cheek by sticking my nose in it so I had to keep my eyes open.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she tells him and pokes her own cheek with a finger “my cheeks are pretty sturdy, you know.”

He thinks her cheeks smell like flowers in summertime Paris. He didn’t know which flowers exactly; he wasn’t like Lee Gon and his Magic Lilies and Forget-Me-Nots. He just remembers wandering aimlessly through the bursts of deep reds, and bright pinks that turn to a color somewhere between blue and purple at the gardens of Musée Rodin last year, on his 32nd birthday.

He had just emerged from his military enlistment then as a man in his thirties and had felt that his life had taken on a different quality. He remembers the thrill of all the new career opportunities, and yet, a strange kind of contentment had also settled over him at the knowledge that he now knew what he wanted out of life after being deprived of one for almost two years. And then he had breathed in the summer air, awash with the flowers of Paris, possibilities, and peace. And that was exactly how Kim Goeun’s cheeks smell like.

He waggles his thick eyebrows at her. “Well, if your sturdy cheeks crush my precious nose, what happens then?”

“Pfft!” she says with a good-natured roll of her eyes, “You probably had them insured or something.”

“So I have your express permission to poke your cheeks with my nose now?”

She nods at him while giving him a toothy smile, the kind that always comes with her signature thumbs up sign that she wags like a puppy tail in front of his face.

“Yes. Plus, we’ll have to change the angle of your kiss anyway.” She points to the screen, still on pause at their kiss. “Between your giant hands and giant nose, there’s barely any of my face left on screen.”

True enough, only her ear peeking between his thumb and forefinger, a small portion of her cheek, and her eyes were visible on screen

“I’ll have to bend my head to the right on the next take,” he says as he hits the play button to resume their scene check “especially if they’re going to do a close up of our faces. And I guess I’ll have to make sure my hand—“

Something onscreen stops him short and he goes back a few seconds to show her what he saw. “Goeunssi,” he begins as he tilts the monitor closer to her “what are you doing with your hands there? And your eyebrows too?”

She peers more closely at the screen and sees what he sees—her furrowed eyebrows and her hands on her lap squeezing together. She remembers furrowing her brows as she felt him squish her cheeks as he pulled her face closer to his and thinking that she must look like a fish right then. However, she does not want to remember squeezing her hands together, nor the way they tingled the moment his lips touched hers.

“Did Taeul not want me to kiss her?” 

She turns to meet his eyes, ready with an answer. “She does! Well, I was going for a pleasantly surprised look,” she began, “but when you pulled me in for a kiss, you ended up smooshing my cheeks together. So I think that’s why I look…like that.”

He furrows his own eyebrows as he hands back the monitor to his assistant. Then he looks at her as he works out the equation in his head.

“I can’t pull you in. You can’t come to me.”

She stares at him and finds herself trying to slow down her breathing, the way she usually did before dropping into the water when scuba diving.

“So that means,” he continues as his open hand traverses the space between his lips and hers, “I will have to go to you and invade your space a little.”

He peers into her eyes before asking, “You’re okay with that, right? Ready?”

She thinks Jeong Taeeul is ready. So Kim Goeun quickly nods her assent and then they tell their director that they’re good to shoot.

It is his right hand that she feels first, the one closest to her. His fingers a trace a curved line over her left ear, through her hair, and his thumb grazes the side of her cheek and stops just before it reaches the tragus of her ear. Then his left hand pushes into her hair and cradles her jaw, gently turning her head to meet his slowly descending lips. And she feels like she has all the time in the world now to command her eyes to follow his lips as they part, until his face is so close she can’t see them anymore. She blinks, once, twice.

She feels the tip of his nose press deeply, but so carefully, into her cheek. And then, when his lips are a hair’s breath away, she tells her eyes to widen, ever so slightly. She feels the flutter of his eyelashes, delicate as a moth’s wings, against her skin as he struggles to close his eyes like she asked.

Then, warm velvet lips close over hers.

She blinks. Her eyebrows twitch. And her eyes follow his lips as they slowly retreat. Her gaze roves over his face to find him speaking to her lips.

_Try guessing what I just proved. The fact that I’ve dated before or that I’m dating right now?_

His eyes meet hers and she belatedly realizes that she could still feel his hands. A lock of her hair had curled itself around his thumb and is now sliding free as his hand falls away. His right hand remains, cupping the back of her head down to her neck as his thumb tucks itself just beneath the shell of her ear. She finds that she likes the feel of his warm hand cradling her head like that.

_Why won’t you answer?_

And because they are Kim Goeun and Lee Minho at a quarter past 9 in the evening at the height of their brilliance, they create the perfect first kiss. And because they are who they are, they are also able to replicate the same perfection for a different camera angle. They review the footage afterwards, of course.

He moves to sit on the edge of the bed to give his legs a rest after staying in the same bent position too long. She waits for him to stretch them and when he doesn’t, she gives him a pointed look. He gives her a half amused, half pleased smile as he stretches his right leg, the one that sustained injuries years ago, and massages the muscles around his knee. He asks her with a look if that had been to her satisfaction. She answers by sliding closer to him and tucking her legs sideways. She gets the other half of his earpiece and puts it on. Then he crosses his legs and tilts the small monitor so that they can go over their performance together.

He thinks he may have blinked too much towards the end but since it worked nicely with her wide-eyed stare, he paid it no mind. But when she runs the footage back a few seconds to check something that caught her eye, he pays attention.

“Ah, _Sunbaenim_ ,” she starts and a muscle in his jaw ticks at the ever present honorific, “you kissed my upper lip on the this take and then on the next one, you kissed my bottom lip. Do you think we’ll have to redo it to make it more consistent? Doesn’t it have to look like it was just one take?”

He watches her as she chews on her lip while worriedly going over their work once more. He thinks it’s ridiculous to have to choose between kissing her upper lip or her bottom lip. He would take her whole mouth, if he could.

“Let them choose,” he says swiftly, suddenly unable to trust himself, “they’ll tell us if we need to redo them.”

He could stare at and study her from across a police desk, a table filled with books at a library or with chicken and beer at a restaurant. He could stare at her across the short distance of a parking lot at sunset or the vast expanse of Gwanghwamun Square at night. He could chase her hands and settle for her forearms, wrists, fingertips, the edge of her sleeves, or even just the space beside her.

But kisses are different.

Kisses are camera angles, slants of faces against each other, and pretend passion. He can’t kiss her and think of the flowers in Paris and the utter peace he felt then or kiss her with the need and intent to absolutely, thoroughly, love her mouth with his. He could not, would not, do that to her. He refused to be that kind of actor, especially with her. Not with her. Not when he wanted to be so much more to her than just another actor she had to kiss.

This was why, after a long drunken discussion with Woo Dohwan and an even longer but more sober discussion with his sister, he had taken the necessary steps to protect Kim Goeun from the world, and from himself. It had to be done of he had any hope in chasing more than just the hand that had held his on that glorious day in Paju City when the sun sank the slowest.

So on their next kiss by the large window of the Hero Taekwondo Center overlooking the yard and into The Alley when Lee Gon taught Jeong Taeeul the laws of kissing the Kingdom of Corea, Lee Minho tries to hold himself back.

He stumbles over his lines at rehearsal, trying to contain his thoughts while he gives his body over to Lee Gon.

When he bends down to kiss Jeong Taeeul, the kiss is soft and easy to keep their impeding goodnight and goodbye a little light. But because Lee Gon’s desire to lay waste to anything that separates him from Taeeul echoes so strongly his own desire to put Kim Goeun in his pocket where no one and nothing can hurt her, his lips get confused and linger on hers just a little. He retreats and swallows the growing lump in his throat.

_What was that? Were you trying to—_

He looks at her soft black hair and he sees nights cozied up in front of the TV with the lights off, her head tucked under his chin while his fingers played with her hair. He looks at her eyebrows, two artful ink black brushstrokes on skin as delicate as ancient paper scrolls, and he sees them coming home to each other after a long day and brushing away her worries from her brows with his fingertip and a kiss to her forehead. He looks at her eyes and sees nothing but starlight and he thinks, he knows, he’ll never lose his way if he could look into her eyes for all his life. He looks at her button nose and he sees her making faces at him over a weekday dinner as she judges his lackluster cooking while he tells her he will make her eat her words when he grills something for her on the weekend. He looks at her lips and he sees early mornings when she gets up early and has to drag him out of bed with laughter and kisses.

_It’s what we do when we have too many things to say._

Somewhere, the sound of water trickles into the scene but the whole world could fade away and still, Lee Minho would not, could not stop looking into Kim Goeun’s eyes.

She holds his stare for as long as she can. She had done this many times before with different male leads. But none of them could have prepared her for the way Lee Minho looks at her— as if he could drown out the entire world so that the only thing he could hear would be pounding of her heart and the sound of her breathing. Her knees wobble under such intensity and she wonders if he can hear that, too.

When the director yells cut after another trickling sound interrupts them, she is grateful to finally get an excuse to break away from Lee Minho’s gaze. She steps back and laughs nervously as she looks around, checking to see if anyone noticed them retreating into their own world.

She sees several crew members scurrying away to deal with the water problem while some began to adjust the light filters surrounding them and to reposition boom microphones. Their director and assistant director are deep in conversation with each other. She thinks it must look like a reversal of the effect of crossing into a parallel world— she and Lee Minho had been frozen in time while the rest of the world had gone about their business. So she steps back into his orbit, convinced that others don’t see how they could shrink the universe down to just the two of them.

She looks back up at him and his brown eyes in this light reminds her of the sunset in Paju City and how she had taken his hand that day. She thinks that, surely, looking up into his eyes while they remained an arm’s length away from each other wouldn’t need as much courage.

And she was right— but only until he reaches out to brush his hand over the side of her face and there goes his thumb again, rubbing so sweetly against her cheek. She lets herself sink into the warmth of his hand. Her eyes hang on to his, and she thinks to herself, _7 episodes left._ So once more, she borrows Jeong Taeeul’s courage and tells her, _Taeul,_ _just for now, let me fall for him a little bit more…just until I have a well of memories of him deep enough for me to sink into when this is over._

It is this impending sense of loss that Kim Goeun lends to Jeong Taeeul for her third kiss with Lee Gon. She tells her, _Taeeul, this is what living, and loving, only for the moment means— it means yesterday could very well be our last happy memory with him and today is the day we say goodbye and weep for all the lost tomorrows._

_He walks towards you and you recognize him because he’s yours. But his footsteps sound like the ticking hands of a clock, moving him further and further away even if he’s already there, right in front of you. You look at him and see his familiar, beloved, face but you also recognize that he, of this time, does not belong to you._

_And even if he gives you beautiful blue flowers that had been Princess Diana’s favorite because you are his Princess Diana, and he tells you he loves you, his kiss will still taste like saltwater sadness and soon, all you will be left with are flowers with petals falling out and the ghost of a pair of hands and lips that loved you for the last time._

And so, Jeong Taeeul falls to the ground, clutching the blue Forget-Me-Nots like it was the only thing anchoring her to this life.

Lee Minho remembers this kiss well. Not the kiss itself, but the moments before and after the kiss.

He is somber as he stands in front of her, their hands clasped together and around the bouquet of flowers. He sees the fatigue in her eyes despite the sunshine beaming from her smile and he worries that she will burn herself out trying to cheer up everyone, including himself. She plays with his hands the same way she did in Paju City, swinging them side-to- side the way young lovers do. It is near midnight and here she is, still shining.

He wonders how Lee Gon could walk away from this light, so soon after having only found her. And then, he remembers the answer with a start. His calculations are off by a few months.

It was not the right time.

Her playful, dancing hands begin to slip from his grasp and he grips her hand tighter in response.

_But the thing is, I have to go back now._

He believes there is a reason why their paths crossed only 4 years after they first saw each other at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in 2015. There is a reason why she first had to work with Kim Eunsook for a character and a drama that would break down her spirit, only to emerge stronger, brighter, and more impervious to the opinions of people who refused to see the kind of soul-blinding beauty that she possessed. There is a reason why he first had to work with Kim Eunsook for a character and a drama that would give him a glimpse of a kind of love that overcomes all odds against it when he was on the last vestige of his youth; right before becoming the man he is now. These are not coincidences. He knows this is destiny at work.

_Right. I also realized I never told you this._

But he also knows that there is a time and place for everything— even life changing confessions. Now was not the time, not when he was still Lee Gon and she was still Jeong Taeeul.

_I love you._

Outside of his mother and sister, he had only loved 3 women in his life. He believes they all ended because he had been too young, too different, and too scared to tell the world he loved someone. But he is older now, and so much braver than before because his heart now belongs to someone whose heart was nearly a twin of his.

_I am deeply in love with you._

He will tell her this when his words are his own and the lips with which he kisses her are his. But for now, for Lee Gon, Lee Minho imagines a world where he has to let go of Kim Goeun because the timing wasn’t right and he wasn’t her destiny. His eyes well up with tears but he keeps them in so he can look at her just a little bit longer before he leaves.

Then he crosses the distance between them, slides his hands around her face like they had always belonged there, and kisses her like he is afraid she would disappear instead of him. The moment his lips touch hers, he closes his eyes and finally lets the tears fall.

When the scene is finished, he switches off Lee Gon and shifts back to himself. He knows she has to prepare herself mentally for the next critical scene and would need some space. As much as he had been looking forward to watching her nail this heartbreaking scene up close, taking care of her and making sure her light does not burn out seems much more important now. So he quietly slips away from the set, looks for a quiet corner, and phones his manager.

“Hey! We’re almost finished, yeah. Listen, can I ask you for a favor? I need you to get me spicy chicken feet and jjamppong to go. Maybe in about 10 minutes?”

Then he stands in the cold night air and waits for his manager to deliver the food. His phone buzzes with an incoming call and when he looks at it, his heart leaps into his throat.

“Noona?”

A pause. And then, almost a breathless reply as if she herself could not believe it, “BH Entertainment agreed to your terms. But only under one condition.”

“I’ll do it. What is it?”

“You must ask for his permission.”


	7. If Today is the Only Day We are Allowed to be Scandalous (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He asks her father an important question on the day that Lee Gon mobilizes all of Corea's forces to protect Jeong Taeeul.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is written for the following crazies who populate my life:  
> GersaliaGayle (Twitter) who tells me that a man who tries to get to know your family is a man with good intentions and worth risking your heart for,  
> pateetsie (Twitter) who, like me, measures all men, fictional and factual, against Pacey Witter,  
> CoreaStories (Twitter/AO3) because, "just because."

The director yells cut and Kim Goeun stops limping across the intersection near the Busan Cinema Center and sprints back to the marker on the other side of the street. They quickly switch to a smaller handheld camera for a tighter shot of her face as Taeeul desperately tries to get to a phone booth. At the director’s cue, Kim Goeun starts limping once more towards the phone booth.

They do this about 3 more times before all the necessary shots are done. And each time she does it, she does it perfectly. It doesn’t matter if her schedule had started almost 7 hours ago and had involved stunt after stunt with motorcycles, cars, guns, and goons. It doesn’t matter if her muscles are beginning to feel the burn. She ignores it because both her legs are still perfectly fine and she knows Lee Minho probably has it worse and he isn’t complaining. So she plods on and does it perfectly because she doesn’t know how to do it any other way.

After they smash a six-wheeler truck onto a phone booth and scatter soft plastic bits meant to look like shattered glass, Kim Goeun runs to her mark and lies down on the ground without any hesitation or artifice. She uses the short lull in time to catch her breath as they start to set up the shot. The nervous wiggling of her feet reveals the restless surge of energy in her body as she prepares for yet, another action scene.

The cameras roll and Kim Goeun plays dead, rises on her knees and pushes down her assailant to disengage his hold on her body. When he recovers, she is ready with a twist of her torso and a right hook so strong that she throws her body on the ground, landing fists and elbows on the hard concrete ground. She does this about 2 more times until they get the shots the director wanted. And every time she does it, she does it perfectly. She does it perfectly because she loves her job and takes pride in it, bruises on her elbows, fists, and all.

Lee Minho arrives on the Busan set just in the nick of time and manages to catch her scenes. He watches her struggle, cover it up, and tuck it away under stellar performances and he stays on the sidelines as he waits for his turn.

_“I know what your back looks like when you walk with someone you love. So tell me, Minhossi, what do you need?”_

_He had leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands in front of him to keep himself from fidgeting nervously. His sister had given his arm a gentle squeeze before getting up from the couch and moving behind her sleek white fiberglass desk._

_“I’m your sister first, and your agent, second,” she had told him as she opened her computer to begin drafting plans, “so tell me what you need and I will tell you how we can make it work.”_

_“I need to protect her.”_

Kim Goeun is directed to stand alone and vulnerable on all sides in the middle of an intersection. It is empty, save for a city block sized horde of black clad men a quarter mile away from her. The director yells action and the horde comes to life in a thunder of a thousand feet hitting concrete, mindless but with a singular goal of delivering Taeeul’s head to Lee Lim.

The tremor in her knees feels real when these nameless, faceless figures rush at her. They are relentless, unforgiving. So when the director yells cut, there is immediate relief. She turns around and tells everyone the terror was real. But she says it with a smile so they don’t fully believe her.

Lee Minho watches her from the sidelines and sees through her smile.

_Lee Yunjeong had nodded at him in that indulgent but mildly annoyed way that older sisters often reserved for their younger brothers. “Protect her from what, exactly?”_

_“The world— the world inside the Internet, to be more specific,” he had replied._

_“That is true. They were especially vicious to her after Goblin. Her agency could have done a better job protecting her.” Her tone was that of disapproval and had held a tinge of disdain._

_He had sat up straighter and looked at his sister across the expanse of her office. “You remember how it was with me? It doesn’t matter how confident and strong your sense of self is. Netizens will find that one insecurity you have and just tear you apart until you’re reduced to nothing.”_

_“You got through fine. She did, too.”_

_“Yes, but if there’s a way that I could spare her that, I would try it. I know I can’t completely shield her from it. But I could bear the brunt of it.”_

_“So, do you want me to send out a warning against spreading malicious rumors?”_

_“But Noona, it’s not a rumor. I do have feelings for her. Plenty of it! I’ll be honest from the start. Let them hate me. And if we deny how I feel, isn’t that a betrayal of fans’ trust? And more importantly, it’s a betrayal of my own heart. I can’t imagine saying I don’t feel anything for Kim Goeun when I look at her and I don’t even have to say anything and the whole world knows. You knew, Noona. And it was only a picture.”_

The production team calls his name and Lee Minho rises from his seat at the sidelines. He strides are sure and long as he walks to the middle of the street. His strong features are set in a tight grim expression. The only softness to him is the wind in his hair as he cut through the rows of dark colored Thoroughbreds and Appaloosas. His all black ensemble with hints of gold does not diminish his large figure as he approaches Maximus, the gleaming white Andalusian at the front and center. He mounts his steed and he is handed Lee Gon’s Four Tiger Sword. He prepares to ride to Jeong Taeeul’s rescue.

Kim Goeun watches him from the sidelines and feels the hair at the back of her neck rise when she hears him bellow the words, “Protect her! She’s the future queen of the Kingdom of Corea.”

_“Minhossi, I understand your need to be transparent. But if you do this, you know will lose some of your fans. Are you prepared for that?”_

_He had risen to his full height and walked across the floor to face his sister head on._

_“Yes.”_

_She had looked up at him from her seat and regarded him with careful eyes._

_“You will lose your most loyal fans, the ones that have loved you from the start.”_

_He had placed his hands flat on his sister’s desk, head bowed low as he thought about it for a few seconds. Then he had raised his head, met his sister’s eyes and said, “If they can’t see by now how the simple act of being in love with her is enough to make me happy, then their loyalty and love were never true in the first place.”_

_“And what about your roles? Once you’re off the market, roles for leading men in dramas will not be as plentiful as before.”_

_His stare had been as steady as his heart as he finally found the courage to be this honest with his sister._

_“I’m 34 years old. I can’t be Gu Junpyo or Kim Tan forever. Lee Byunghun was 35 years old when he began to focus solely on films like A Bittersweet Life, I Come with the Rain, and Iris. Gong Yoo was 37 when he did A Man and A Woman, Train to Busan, and The Age of Shadows. Look where they are now. I’d like to get there, too, someday. Now this is the best time for me to make that gamble with my career. And I can’t think of a more worthy reason to risk it all than for love. For this kind of love.”_

Lee Minho practices the movements in his head as he wills his body to follow. A downward slash to left. Then right. Three steps forward. A quick succession of strikes to the left and right before pivoting on his back heel to spin clockwise. He ends with a forward lunge and an upward slash to the right.

But his legs wobble on that last spin and he realizes that rushing through the steps this way puts too much pressure on his right leg. So he slows himself down, learning the faults and flaws of his body. He understands the danger of doing things this way. But he will never know how much he has healed unless he puts his body to the test.

He takes a deep breath, goes back to his mark, and begins again. After his second run through, he does not wobble anymore.

_“Well, career-wise it is a risk. And I’m glad you’re going into this with your eyes wide open,” his sister had replied as she sat_ _back on her leather chair._

_She had to be careful not to encourage too much recklessness in him but a large part of her was actually very proud of her brother. He had ridden the tide of his popularity well and given all of his projects the same dedication and intensity. No project had been too small or too big for him. But more importantly, he had also been smart about his investments._

_“But financially, I can assure you that you’re at a really good place to make calculated risks. And personally, this change in pace and direction in your career can only bring good things. It was about time.”_

_Hope surged and it gave his bones more steel to know that his sister was behind him on this. “It is set then,” he had declared with a triumphant smile on his face. “No denials. No hiding, either. I think that was the mistake I made with Suzy and I don’t want to repeat it. We hid it so well for two years and although we were happy, we were living in a bubble—”_

_“And happiness is rarely a true test of love’s strength. Adversity is.”_

_Lee Minho’s ears had perked as he heard the familiar tone in his older sister’s voice— the kind that always led to a difficult question in the end. She had often used that tone on him when she helped him with his homework when they were children._

_“Minhossi, how long do you think she’ll be able to withstand the media frenzy that’s about to rain down upon her?_

She stands in front of him, feet apart and one hip cocked to the side with her hands on her hips. There is a smirk on her face as she watches him swing the Four Tiger Sword around like it was a toy and he was a five-year-old kid who just got it for his birthday.

They are on a short break between the scenes, waiting for the crew to change some of the set up. But instead of sitting on their designated chairs on the sidewalk, they choose to argue about which one of them can wield the Four Tiger Sword better.

He notices her smirk and says, “What? You think your Hong-yi can beat General Choi Young or Lee Gon?” Then he playfully thrusts the sword covered in fake blood into the space on her left side.

She cries out in surprise and sidesteps to avoid him but it is too late. She turns her hip to check her hoodie and growls, “You left a stain there!”

She advances menacingly on him and makes what she thinks is a scary face. He backs away and swings the sword into a defensive position but there is laughter on his lips, cheeks, and eyes. He thinks she’s beautiful— fake blood, messy ponytail, scrunched up growly little face and all.

“Come here, you!”

He apologizes for the fake bloodstain through a wide grin he can’t be bothered to hide. He notes that she does not call him sunbaenim anymore, not since Paju City. His grin widens even more.

_He had spent a good amount of time turning things over and over in his head as he had had driven from Busan to his sister’s office in Seoul. Protecting Kim Goeun before she was even his to protect required in depth information and luckily for him, he had spent the last seven months staring at her. He had catalogued detail after detail on Kim Goeun so when his sister asked how she would fare under intense media scrutiny, he had an incredibly embarrassing amount of answers ready for her._

_“When she’s tired, she can sit anywhere and she’ll be comfortable. She will sit on the stairs, on a ledge, on cinder blocks, or just crouch on the floor of a bamboo forest. It doesn’t matter to her. She will even sit like a child, or a man, or hum a tune in her head and dance to it while sitting. She doesn’t fuss with her make up or her hair. She doesn’t ask for a mirror every hour like I do. She doesn’t complain about how late or how early the shoots are. She—“_

_“You might want to get to the point, Minhossi.”_

_He had the grace to look a little embarrassed but he continued, “Sorry Noona, yes. I’ll get to the point. I do have one. Well, she doesn’t care about a lot of things and she’s very transparent about it. But the one thing she does care about is food. She eats only after the shoots are done. She can eat anything, anywhere, with anyone, and she eats like no one is watching her. But she’ll never eat before, or during a shoot. Do you know why?”_

_His sister had blinked at him and said dryly, “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”_

_“Because she still gets so nervous before every scene. 17 acting awards in 8 years and she still gets nervous. That’s because all she cares about is acting, her craft. She loves it, Noona.”_

_His voice had carried so much pride, awe, and love it could have swayed stones._

_“That’s why she will hate all the extra media attention on her personal life because she takes such great pride in her work. But if I’m right in that we are destined for each other, then she will be able to take all the unnecessary media attention just fine. Because when she loves, she won’t care much about anything except for the one thing that matters to her and—”_

_A lump the size of hope had grown in his throat and he had to pause and swallow. At this moment, both had realized at the same time the immensity of the gamble he was about to make. And Lee Yunjeong’s heart had broken just a little bit for her younger brother when she heard him speak again._

_“I’m hoping it’s going to be me.”_

They are no strangers to hugging by now, especially the kind where they run to each other, their bodies colliding with and locking around one another. But tonight, there is something different in the way he takes her in his arms and in the way she comes to him.

His footsteps pound loudly into the ground as he runs to her. There is an insistence in the beat of his gait as he pushes against the hard concrete to propel himself forward. His body knows by now how low his knees have to bend and the angle his arms have to take in order to scoop her up and latch her body onto his. But the sound their bodies make as they slam into one another is different.

The sound had never been there before.

It is the kind of sound that air makes when it whooshes out of a tightly packed space, leaving behind nothing, not even air, between two solid masses. Tonight their hugs are made of that sound.

And although Kim Goeun had previously given up the fight against melting whenever Lee Minho would take her into his arms, the way she now lets him pick her up and clasp her body so tightly to his with her toes dangling in the air is giving her the same heady feeling of weightlessness that she could only get when scuba diving or skydiving.

So she lets him do it. She lets him seize her entire torso and lift her up so she can easily wrap her arms around his neck. She lets him sink his face into her neck. She lets him sway her when their unmoving bodies were not enough to contain the force of his hug. She lets him swing her around in a half circle long after the director has yelled cut. She lets him do it over and over again, during rehearsals, during takes.

But what she likes about when he does it is that for all force he exerts when he lifts her up into his arms, he is gentle when he sets her down and always makes sure she is steady on her feet before he lets go of her.

And even then, his hands still linger.

_“Minhossi, does she not know how you feel about her?”_

_He had shaken his head at his sister and said, “I don’t want to start anything while we’re in the middle of filming. I can’t do that to her, to us. If I want this to last, I have to—“_

_“Take care of it right from the very start. Like Omma always tells us.”_

_They had shared a quick smile before he continued._

_“Noona, I need to build trust and connection with both of our fan bases. I can’t hide her away like a shameful secret and have her fans feel like I disrespected her. And I don’t want to alienate my own fans and surprise them with a shady Dispatch article one day. They have to know that this has been real for me, at least, right from the very beginning.”_

_“How do you plan to do that?”_

He hangs on to her arm as he and the director try to figure out the best way for him to carry her using two camera angles. They try for a high angle shot first and while they looked for something for the cameraman to stand on, he tries to carry her to see what level her face would be at for the camera.

She moves away from him and tries to slip her arm off his grip. But his reflexes are fast and he catches her right elbow and left hand. He keeps her near him.

“I’ll lift you up like this,” he says as he tries to demonstrate how he will carry her, hoping to allay her fears.

She is reluctant to try it out and he just knows she is worried about his leg. It does not help that she was told that he would be late to the shoot today because of a doctor’s appointment. Technically, it was true. But it had lasted only for half an hour and not a second more.

He has to show her he could carry her without any lasting damage. So when the booster for the cameraman to stand on arrives, he goes right for her and slips his arms behind her back and knees. Then he swings her up into his arms, bridal style.

She is light, but rigid in his arms.

“Relax,” he whispers to her in a low voice.

“I am relaxed,” she hisses, her neck tense.

He gives her a pointed look and says, “You’re going to be easier to carry of you relax your spine. Sort of like floating on water.”

She furrows her brows and bites her lip, understanding the mechanics of it but still hating the idea of him in pain.

“Trust me,” he says in a soft but firm voice, his dark eyes fixed on hers.

She gives him a reluctant nod. And as he gently sets her back down on the ground, she gives his elbow a squeeze for all the things she couldn’t say right now.

_“Noona, have you seen our press conference, Netflix’s Jenga, and The Swoon interviews?”_

_“I don’t think I have seen them all. Why? What about them?” Her fingers had hovered over the keyboard while she had wondered what kind of headache those videos would give her._

_“People have been posting videos that analyze my feelings for Goeunsshi based on my body language on YouTube, you know. They look amazing.”_

_“What did it say?”_

_“They were all in English so…yeah. But, from all the slow-motions and zoom-ins, it’s safe to say that they all agree that I have a crush on Kim Goeun. So we have to make sure that all the promotional material that will come out will have the same breadcrumbs.”_

_“You’re talking about controlling the media narrative right from the beginning. Okay, I’m listening.”_

_“Noona, I need you to put pressure on SBS and give us complete control over the remaining Behind the Scenes footage.”_

_She had given him a firm head shake before saying, “That’s not possible. However, I can demand that for scenes that contain you.”_

_“I can live with that. So we go through the footage and release only those that show me being the affectionate one. We’ll edit out the ones where she responds to me—“_

_“If she responds to you at all.” She had not been able to resist the jab. She wasn’t his older sister for nothing._

_“Noona!”_

_“I’m just joking!” she had said through mild laughter as she continued to make notes. “Okay, we’ll do that for the BTS so that way, if she rejects you, it will be obvious from the very beginning that she never wanted you and fans won’t accuse her of leading you on. And if she accepts you, it’s only because you pursued her relentlessly and they can’t accuse her of seducing you.”_

_“That’s incredibly perceptive of you, Noona,” he had said with a little trepidation. He had not thought that far into the future. And if he had been a little more honest with himself, he had not even thought of preparing for a future where she would reject him_

_“And also, that was a little harsh. But still, thank you.”_

_He didn’t believe in parallel worlds like Lee Gon but if the world had split into two, he had prayed that the one he was in was the world where she chose him._

_“It’s hard to be a woman in the entertainment industry. I’m just glad to get this chance to protect someone with so much more to give.”_

_He had agreed with her. Being a Hallyu star had its pros and cons but now, more than ever, he was grateful for the power and influence that came with it if they could be used to shield what was important to him._

The director asks for a low angle shot of Lee Gon picking up Jeong Taeeul after she faints and Kim Goeun forces herself to relax. She inhales through her nose and exhales through her mouth like her Taekwondo master taught her before executing the Taegeuk and Palgwe forms.

She looks at Lee Minho and understands what he is asking of her as bends down on one knee. He presses his right toes down on the ground to ease the pressure on his right knee. She quickly gets into a sitting position on the ground as his arm slips under her arm and around her back. Carrying her from this position is going to put all the pressure on his knees and back and so she wishes she were air right now instead of a bundle of nerves.

The camera is put in position for the low angle shot.

She pulls her knees up. Then she turns her face up to him, one arm curled over his shoulder while her other arm is bent back, her hand on his knee.

He looks down at her, eyes dark and intense as ever.

“Ready?”

She inhales. “Ready,” she breathes out and her hand falls away from his knee and drops to the ground. She lets her head roll back and closes her eyes.

The camera begins to roll and she feels him slip his other arm behind her knees. She keeps breathing, in and out. And then, she is floating. With her eyes closed, her universe is reduced to his arms around her knees and back, her hand on his shoulder, the sound of his voice thick with fatigue and something else, and her steady, even breathing.

There is a moment when she feels her little universe begin to shake and her hand on his shoulder tightens while her other hand clutches at his back, ready to pull herself up should he need her to pull her own weight. But then she remembers that Jeong Taeeul was supposed to have fainted.

She also remembers that she said she would trust Lee Minho. And so, she lets go of her worried, clutching hands and just lets him carry her whole world in his arms.

“Sub-captain Seok, take are of things here. And Maximus too,” he says and her world turns as he leaves.

The director yells, “Cut!” and they quickly return to themselves. She opens her eyes as she hears him grunt with the effort to set her down as gently as he always does. Her right hand finds his back, tight and tense beneath his clothes. She spreads her fingers wide and pats him on his lower back, and then, three more forceful but careful strikes— the way she often did for her father’s back when he had been bent over their garden or his painting too long.

“You did good,” she whispers to him with a shy, embarrassed smile because she suddenly feels like she wants to lead him to a chair, wipe off the sweat from his forehead and neck, hand him a glass of cold water and rub his back in soothing circling motions. But they are on a set and the pats on the back are all she could muster.

“So did you,” he responds softly but he couldn’t quite meet her eyes just yet. His knees are still wobbly. He swears to do better, next time.

_“Noona, I have two more things to ask of you.”_

_His tone had given her pause and she stopped typing notes altogether._

_“What are they?”_

_“I need complete control over my social media accounts.”_

_Lee Yunjeong had rubbed two fingers each on her temples. Her brother set loose on all social media platforms was management’s nightmare. She couldn’t possibly think of a reason why he thought she would give him this._

_“Minhossi—“_

_“I know you’re going to say no so I’ll give you this. Give me complete control over all of my social media accounts and I will inform you of every move I make on them, before I make them. The same goes for any movement I make when courting Goeunssi. We will renegotiate this matter when she becomes my girlfriend and we will add her to the decision-making process.”_

_His sister had been stunned into silence for a few moments._

_“But…you hate that. You absolutely hate telling anyone, even your manager, about the things you post and do outside of work.”_

_“I know. But it’s what you’ve always wanted, right? And this is what I want too. We both win with this arrangement.”_

_“And what if she does not agree to be courted or being your girlfriend?”_

_“Noona…”_

_“Minhossi, you are my brother and I love you. That’s why I get to ask you the difficult questions. Now, if she doesn’t agree to be anything to you, what of then?”_

_He had closed his eyes briefly before answering, “You can have complete control over all my social media accounts for a year if she doesn’t. I can’t imagine wanting anything to do with the world if she doesn’t.”_

_“Why do you want control over all of them? You only ever use Instagram.”_

_“I want to give her complete control over what we post on my end when she becomes mine. I can’t do that when I have to ask your permission for each post I make.”_

_“Even your work posts?”_

_“Yeah,” he had grinned at her, his head already swimming far into the future “I don’t want my girlfriend getting angry because I post too many sexy photoshoots.”_

_His sister had rolled her eyes at him and said, “I don’t think she will care, actually. Now, what’s the other thing?”_

_Lee Minho had flexed his hands before curling them into fists. Then, he had taken a deep breath and on his exhale, he spread his hands flat over the desk._

_“Remember a few years ago when we bought a few shares of Kakao M? They bought BH Entertainment last year. I need you to lean on that just a little and get BH Entertainment to agree with to the same terms I just made you agree to. I’ll include their Goeunssi’s manager and his direct supervisor in the list of people I report my movements to. I have to show her that I can protect her. And if I’m going to protect her, I want her protected on all sides.”_

“Okay, I’m ready,” he says with certainty.

She is almost dead on her feet as she sits on her haunches in the middle of the intersection. She looks up at Lee Minho and wonders how he is still standing.

And smiling.

The director’s voice booms from the megaphone, calling for the start of the shoot. So she gets up and dusts her hands on the legs of her jogging pants.

“Come here,” he tells her.

The authority in his voice and his strange smile annoys her and she shoots back, “You come here!” She does not notice the smile that spreads across her face.

“Alright! Let’s begin!”

She goes to him, finally. His arms slip beneath her body as her own arms wound themselves around his broad shoulders. He lifts her so easily this time and shifts her to a more comfortable position in his arms.

“How are you still standing?”

Lee Minho smiles at her question as he gazes down at her. He wonders how she would react if he told her the real reason why he was late to the shoot today. Then he says, “Because you have the nature of my favorite number, zero. ”

He receives two swats on his shoulder and an eye roll for that and he just laughs at her because Kim Goeun had absolutely no idea how true that statement was earlier today when he and his sister had crossed Gangnam-gu to Dosan-daero and up to the offices of BH Entertainment to meet with her father, Kim Ingi.

Lee Minho pressed the button for the 6th floor of the gray and black building that housed BH Entertainment about 15 minutes before 9 in the morning. He flexed his right hand repeatedly; trying to get rid of the nervous shaking that had started the moment he and his sister entered the building. He watched the digital display above the buttons change and when it hit the 5th floor, he shook his hand lightly and then stuffed it into the pocket of his dress pants.

He had dressed for the occasion of course— black dress pants and a matching formal jacket, white button up shirt, and a black necktie. His sister had made fun of his overly formal attire when she saw him but he had shrugged it off. This meeting was too important to him and he didn’t want to make a bad first impression on Kim Goeun’s father.

The elevator opened at the 6th floor to a spacious receiving area designed with clean lines of old lace white panels along the walls, only broken up by framed portraits of their artists on the east and west walls. Behind the receptionist’s desk, the wall carried the words BH Entertainment and their logo in simple black letters. The entire floor was deserted as per their request for utmost secrecy.

A lone official stood up from the receptionist’s desk upon their arrival and gave them a slight bow in greeting. Then, he directed them towards a narrow corridor on the right side that led to a conference room hidden away from view with a door made of frosted glass.

He felt his sister’s hand rub his upper back comfortingly as they approached the door. He knew she wasn’t going to go into the meeting with Mr. Kim Ingi and was simply there for moral support.

“Ready?”

Lee Minho looked at his sister one last time, the disquiet in his mind marring his handsome face.

“You’re a good man, Minhossi. I’d tell you not to worry but the fact that you are worried only tells me your heart is in the right place.”

Lee Minho looked at his sister, eyes shining with gratitude he couldn’t quite verbalize. Then he closed his eyes and let his sister’s words wash over him. He breathed deep. And on his exhale, he opened his eyes and pushed open the door to the conference room.

Kim Ingi’s back was turned to him when Lee Minho entered the room. His stature was of the round, stocky, fatherly sort. He looked like the kind of man who spent his weekends with his family, full of good food and laughter.

He turned around the sound of the door sliding close and gave Lee Minho one of the kindest smiles he had ever seen. It disarmed him. Clearly, Kim Goeun’s sunshine filled smile was something she got from her father.

Both men had clasped hands and bowed to each other, exchanging names and pleasantries until finally, Kim Ingi led Lee Minho to the conference table in the middle of the room. The shades had been half drawn, letting in some of the early morning light but leaving them with a little bit of privacy.

They took seats facing each other, an identical pair of folders in front of them.

“I’ve seen the terms you’ve asked for and they’re all supposed to protect my daughter. I thank you for that,” Kim Ingi began gently.

“That was my intent, sir. There is no need to thank me. I believe that’s what we all want for her,” was Lee Minho’s stiff reply.

“But have you asked her what she wants?”

The question threw him for a bit. He had expected her father to be protective and combative as most fathers of daughters would be. This was different, so he quickly collected himself and answered, “I intend to, sir. But not right now, while we still have responsibilities to the drama. I don’t want to mar her good work with any scandal.”

“So all of this would be for nothing if she does not return your affections?”

“No, sir. If she turns me down, the same terms of protection would still apply.”

“And you’re alright with that?” Kim Ingi’s eyes on him were soft with fatherly concern and Lee Minho did not know what to make of it.

“I don’t understand the question, sir.”

Kim Ingi patted the folder in front of him and said, “Why would you choose to protect my daughter this way regardless of whether chooses to be with you or not?”

Lee Minho knew the answer to this question. He had prepared for this question.

“I understand the difficulties she may face if she chooses to be with me. I also understand how she could easily choose to live a better, quieter life without me. I wish to protect her from the backlash that she will no doubt get when this hits the news. But her rejection will not change how I want to protect the peace of mind she fought so hard to achieve after _Goblin_ ended.”

He paused to breathe.

“But if, by some grace of God and the universe, she gives me, us, a chance and decides that falling for me isn’t such a bad idea, then I want to give her a safe place to land on.”

Kim Ingi was quiet for a few moments, fiddling with the gold band on his ring finger.

“My princess is not a weak girl.”

Lee Minho’s smile broke out of his face as he nodded in agreement at Kim Goeun’s father.

“I know, sir,” he began, his smile softening into a look of fondness. “She’s brave. She does what is expected of her and more. But she also does what people least expect her to do— not because they least expect it. But she does it because she wants to.”

Kim Ingi observed Lee Minho’s face as he rattled off things he already knew about his daughter. He looked lost, but happily so. He wondered if he looked like that when he talked about his daughter.

“She takes difficult roles. She takes time off for school event though stardom was at her feet. She takes roles that make the audience hate and fear her. She takes a role in a drama that is too new, too experimental for Korean TV because she wanted to challenge herself with Jeong Taeeul and Luna. She did all that because she wanted to.”

Kim Ingi nodded along to everything Lee Minho had listed down.

“I taught her that,” he said, looking for all the world like the proudest father.

“She told me that, sir,” Lee Minho said with a slight bow of reverence. “She’s braver than I am, I think. So this time, I needed to brave enough, be as brave as her, to ask everyone in MYM Entertainment and BH Entertainment, to ask you, for this.”

Kim Ingi tipped his head to the side and said, “You know, even if I give you my permission, it’s still my daughter who gets to decide, right?”

“Yes, I understand that, sir.”

“And yet, here you are. I know it was a condition set out by BH Entertainment but I would still like to ask you why you, Lee Minho, would willingly ask me for this permission.”

Lee Minho looked down on his hands that had been clutching his pants since the moment he had taken a seat. He forced his hands to let go and opened his sweaty palms. He smoothed them over his thighs to calm himself down.

“Sir, let’s forget who I am and everything else for a moment and focus on what’s at stake,” he began. Then he looked up to face Kim Goeun’s father. “I love your daughter. I am deeply in love with her, sir. For months now, my days have been filled with her. And if she isn’t by my side, she is in my thoughts. Because if she isn’t a part of me on any given day, I feel empty. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know when it started. But I do know that I don’t want it to end. And I know where I want it go.”

Kim Ingi suddenly burst out laughing.

“Lee Minho, are you asking for my daughter’s hand in marriage?”

Lee Minho’s shy smile appeared, the kind that seemed to be too embarrassingly big so he had to hide it by turning his lips inward. Then he got ahold of himself and finally asked Kim Goeun’s father the question he was there to ask.

“In the future, I hope you could ask me that question again and I can give you a different answer. But for now, Mr. Kim Ingi, I would like to ask for your permission to date your daughter.”


	8. If Today is the Only Day We are Allowed to be Scandalous PART III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was the one kiss that mattered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last part of Chapter 6. I swear.
> 
> This was written for:  
> Patty - because this is the only way I can help make her un-sad; also, all the Pacey references are for her ^_^  
> CoreaStories - because she says the ears are erogenous and I agreed so wholeheartedly with her ^_^  
> Gayle - Fish + Lee Minho is a gross combination but she loves it...and I love her...so. yeah. ick. ^_^  
> Royal Court Ladies GC - because around two months ago they were asking for a fic that involved knocking on hotel doors in the middle of the night

Kim Goeun had a talent for finding the secret corners of a set and making herself as inconspicuous as possible in order to steal naps. One such corner was at the end of the hallway outside Lee Gon’s study that led to nowhere. After picking her spot, she immediately sat down on the dark wooden floor but was careful not to smudge the fake blood on her hands. Then she rested her back against the pillar and her head thumped back sleepily as her eyes drifted shut.

The Busan shooting schedule had been brutal and long, wrapping up almost always before dawn. But now, after having finished Lee Gon and Jeong Taeeul’s bloody reunion at Busan last night, they had moved over the country up to Yongin City in the Gyeonggi Province where all the built sets for the interior of the Corean Palace were. Since they were on a tight schedule, they would be cramming a lot of scenes for the next two days that they would be hunkered down in the small and unassuming Ischia Hotel.

At the thought of the soft, fluffy and freshly laundered bedcovers waiting for her back in her hotel room, Kim Goeun groaned softly. 

Lee Minho had a talent for finding Kim Goeun wherever she happened to be on the set. At any time that she wasn’t by his side, his skin would prickle as if to alert his brain that something wasn’t quite right. His eyes would scan the room and force his neck to twist and bend just to search for any sign of her ponytail. It would be tied haphazardly, Taeeul style, but it would smell like the floral shampoo she had used back in the Ahopsan Bamboo Forest shoot. Sometimes, it would just be the lithe sound of her laughter rising above the racket of a busy set that would tell him where she was. Then his feet would turn restless and refuse to quiet down until he could be where she was.

One such moment was when an assistant form the props department was touching up the fake blood on the back of his hands and he had to stand still as he watched Kim Goeun walk down the hallway and turn a corner. When the props lady was done with him, he went off in search for the corner Kim Goeun had disappeared into.

“Goeunssi…PD-nim said that you will be needed on the set in 15 minutes.”

The timid voice of one of her assistant might have broken through her sleep but it was the touch of something cold and wet on her forehead that jarred her awake. When her eyes were fully opened and could properly focus, she saw Lee Minho peering down at her with a badly concealed smirk. He was also holding a bottle of Craft Black Georgia Coffee over her head.

Grumpy from her interrupted nap, she frowned up at him and said, “You stole a prop to wake me up?”

“I didn’t wake you up,” he said with an amused and slightly smug smile. Then he pointed at her assistant and said, “She did it. And I didn’t steal anything. We always get a free case of this every shoot. Here, drink a little of this.”

She looked at it askance and was about to reject it when he made a disapproving sound and said, “You’re running low on energy and I know you didn’t eat breakfast so you’re still operating on last night’s fumes. So either you get some real food for fuel or you drink this. And we both know you’re not going to do eat.”

She wrinkled her nose up at him. “You sound like an _ahjumma,_ ” she said but was already grudgingly reaching out for the bottle of brewed coffee when she realized that she still had fake blood on her hands. “Ah—“

She then frowned at her hands and wondered how she was going to drink the coffee. With her lips curled up in annoyance, she held her blood-covered hands up to Lee Minho, wordlessly asking for his help. He didn’t have the fake blood all over the palms of his hands like she did. As an afterthought, she flashed him what she hoped was a sweet smile.

But because she was a little grumpy from having woken up from a nap, her smile came out looking terse and a little terrifying. Lee Minho burst out laughing and took out his phone.

“Hold that scary smile for me and I’ll open this bottle for you,” he said as he positioned himself in front of her, ready to take her picture with his phone.

Kim Goeun groaned and rolled her eyes at him but did it anyway just to get it over with. She did the standard _aegyo_ pose with her palms up and open beneath her chin to frame her face. Of course, with the fake blood and the annoyed slant of her eyes, she knew she was far from cute right then. Only he seemed to find it amusing enough.

“Ah, the brave Jeong Taeeul,” he said as he took several shots of her, smiling as he did so. “I’ll send these to you later when you have your phone with you,” he said as he put his phone back in his pocket before opening her bottle of Georgia Coffee.

She blinked sleepily up at him. So he knew about how she sometimes left her phone with her assistants during physically demanding scenes. After eight months of shooting the drama with him, it really shouldn’t surprise her anymore that he had all these things about her filed away in some part of his brain. But it still did.

“Here you go,” he said as he handed over her coffee. But when she reached for it again, they both realized that she wouldn’t be able to hold the bottle at all.

Kim Goeun stared longingly at the coffee. It was only six thirty in the morning and they still had a long way to go today. She really needed that coffee. Then she looked up at Lee Minho who looked like he was trying very hard to figure things out and a sudden playful thought popped into her head.

She opened her mouth and said, “Ahhh” while pointing at the bottle and then to her mouth.

They locked eyes for a second and then they both burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of her act. She shook her head at herself and moved to get up from the floor when their laughter had subsided.

He bent low and automatically helped her up with his hand on her elbow. Then he said, “Do you still have that rose gold Starbucks tumbler you had in Busan? The one with the straw that you carry around all the time?”

She nodded at him and said, “Oh, good idea! I’ll just use that.” Then she went to where her assistants were huddled to get it. He followed her, of course. Because that’s what he has been doing for the past eight months now. When they got the straw out, Lee Minho took it and dropped it into Kim Goeun’s Georgia Coffee bottle.

He jut his chin forward as he held the bottle of coffee for her so she could drink from it and said, “Don’t drink it all okay? Too much black coffee isn’t going to be good on an empty stomach.”

But she was already sipping away and only managed a distracted nod. He waited until he felt the bottle become lighter by half before he gently shook it to remind her that she’s had enough. Reluctantly, she let go of the straw and wiped her lips on the sleeve of her hoodie.

“Thank you,” she said softly. This time, the small shy smile she sent him was genuine.

He basked in it. Because really, what else could he do when she smiled at him like that?

And then the assistant director called them to proceed to their marks at the other end of the hallway to begin the shoot. So Lee Minho handed her coffee to her assistants in case she might still need to take sips of it throughout the day. Then he followed her quickly to start the shoot of one of their longest days in filming.

They’ve had eight months of these and although he could feel it wearing them both down, he hadn’t lost the fire that had started in his belly from the first moment he was told he would be working with Kim Goeun. Standing by her side now, he watched her as she shook off the sleepiness from earlier as if it was just a warm weighed blanked around her shoulders she could slide off any time she wanted. Assistants swarmed in around them for last minute touch ups to their hair, make up, clothes, and fake blood to make sure they still looked like Lee Gon and Jeong Taeeul from last night. One by one they flitted out and he was left with her, poised and ready for the scene.

Then he caught a playful spark in the corners of her eyes as she spotted his hands and mimicked the way he held them up and away from his body. As always, she had a way of moving that showed him exactly what she wanted him to understand. So without any word passing between them, he started humming the opening theme to Dr. Romantic, a drama about surgeons.

Delightedly, she threw herself into the role of one.

“Scalpel,” she said in mock seriousness and then laughed at herself afterwards because it was the only thing she knew that surgeons said.

And because he liked hearing her laugh some more, he racked his brain for another medical term just to extend the moment.

“Suction,” he said and she gamely did the motions, even making sound effects for it. And as they laughed at their silliness, he realized that Kim Goeun had never played a doctor in any of her movies or dramas. He wondered if she had already picked her next project after this.

The thought of all of this ending after a month’s time squeezed at his heart but luckily, the director chose that moment to begin rolling. They are instantly pulled back into the world where there are two Koreas and he doesn’t have to think about waking up one morning and going to work without Kim Goeun by his side.

For now, all he had to do was carry her. And so he did, from one end of the corridor to the other in three different takes and two camera angles. And then he had to carry her some more— through the double doors and into Lee Gon’s bedroom.

He carried her so easily now that it almost felt like floating on water when she was in his arms. But all that carrying around without any actual lines to say made Kim Goeun very sleepy. The coffee, if it had any effect at all, wasn’t much help. While the staff rearranged the lights and reflectors around Lee Gon’s bed, her eyelids tried to fight off their losing battle against gravity.

Helplessly, Lee Minho watched her. Because really, when wasn’t he watching her?

“Just go to sleep,” he whispered lowly. “No one will notice anyway. You’re practically just a prop now.”

Kim Goeun forced her eyes wide open at him. “No,” was her short, stubborn reply.

And then they started rolling and she had to keep her eyes closed during the next few scenes. That wasn’t hard to do. What was hard was keeping the sleep from becoming too real.

She drifted in and out while the director and Lee Minho discussed which angle the forehead kiss should be shot from; even while Kim Youngok as Lady Noh and Lee Minho rehearsed and shot their scenes. At one point, Kim Youngok’s sudden sneeze in the middle of a take was the only thing that saved her from completely falling asleep during a particularly long lull. She had jerked awake then and the sudden movement made Lee Minho look at her with furrowed brows.

“Go sleep,” he insisted.

“No,” she hissed.

He laughed ruefully at her stubbornness and then moved as if to close her eyes with his own hand to get her to sleep. But quick as an alley cat in the dark, Kim Goeun spotted the roving BTS camera and waved at it. Lee Minho’s hand stuttered and he flexed it awkwardly by his knee.

She glanced at him and uselessly pointed out, “BTS cam.”

He nodded. But his concerned eyes never left her.

And when Kim Youngok returned after getting her allergic rhinitis checked, he was finally forced to focus back on the job at hand. After four takes, they were able to get enough footage to make the scene. The director then switched onto rehearsals for the scene between Lee Gon and Jeong Taeeul after the doctors have hooked her up to IV unit so that they don’t have to keep going back and forth.

But when Lee Minho glanced down at Kim Goeun, she was fast asleep. Sighing in regret that he had to wake her up, he brushed the hair back from her forehead and whispered, “Goeunssi, wake up.”

And because she was never really a deep sleeper, her body jerked awake once more. Her bleary eyes tried to focus on his face as she croaked out, “Our scene is next?”

He nodded at her and said, “Rehearsal, yes. Before you change into the royal pajamas.”

She snorted at the phrase ‘royal pajamas’ but was already trying to get up so she can ask her assistants for her script. Then she felt his hand on her shoulder, preventing her from getting up.

“I got your script right here,” he said, waving her script in his other hand. “Just get under the covers so we can rehearse how I’m going to hold your hand for that scene.”

In no mood to argue, Kim Goeun took her script from him and rolled away so he can turn down the covers for her. Then she rolled back and into the luxurious royal blue sheets from Crown Goose that had swirling leaves and flowers in gold, which were reminiscent of the Baroque era. It looked entirely too ostentatious for her taste but she couldn’t deny that they felt like clouds against her skin. She burrowed herself deeper into the covers and didn’t even mind when he tucked her in.

Lee Minho smiled softly down at her. Then he placed his hand on top of her head and began to brush back her soft baby hair with his thumb. His heart melted a little more when she leaned into his touch. He wondered, for the first time, if she was acting or this sleepy Taeeul was also her sleepy Goeun self.

“Get some more sleep,” he said, keeping his voice low and quiet.

“Stop making me go to sleep,” she murmured.

“Well…that is pretty close to your actual line.”

Kim Goeun blinked at him, slowly. And when it finally dawned on her that they were supposed to be rehearsing for their scene, she sent a sheepish smile his way. She felt for her script under the covers and brought it out to take a look at her lines. She scanned through it carefully, lips moving at the same time as her eyes over the page.

As always, he watched her. Now and again, his eyes would stray to her lips.

“I’m ready. From the top.”

He wrenched his eyes away from her lips to check for his next line. He had a little trouble locating it. A few heartbeats later, he found it.

_Get some more sleep._

Lee Minho’s voice dipped somewhere between a whisper and the sound one makes when wishing on dandelion seeds and sending them up into the air. And when Kim Goeun closed her eyes, she could easily imagine being carried away in the wind by the sound of his voice.

She tried to match it.

_Why are you making me sleep just when I finally get to see you? I look awful, don’t I?_

_Not at all. You look like a huge bandage right now. But you’re a really pretty bandage._

If voices had hands when he said those words, his would feel like the hands that had gathered her hair and held it in one hand while the other had tucked errant strands behind the delicate shell of her ear, one winter night. It was the kind of voice that steals through bamboo forests and envelops around her in the tightest of embraces and made her afraid of what she would see if she closed her eyes.

She wasn’t afraid now.

_But how did you find me, though?_

_I told you, I’m a decent person here._

_I drank water at the Taekwondo center and lost consciousness. Now I know how important it is to have food tasted beforehand._

_You can tell me about it later. You can tell me when you’re all better._

On the last few syllables, his voice had quieted to something so tender and intimate that she wondered if that was how he sounded like when his head drops onto his pillow and he says good night.

Her voice tapered off and followed him into the quiet.

_I thought it would’ve been our last moment together— that time in the bamboo forest._

_Lots of things happened while we were apart. That’s why I couldn’t go back._

_That’s a relief. I thought that door had closed._

_Don’t worry. If that door closes, I’ll open all the doors in the universe and I’ll come to you._

It was like listening to him talk while her ear is pressed into his chest. There’s the rumble, then the loud but muffled sound of something so close but still separated from her by skin and bones. She didn’t mind that, though. Because if his voice sounded like that, it also meant that she could pretend that she was resting her head on the solid mass of his chest and simply fall asleep to the timbre of his voice beneath her ear.

And just like that, Lee Minho got to watch Kim Goeun fall asleep.

He figured he could buy her around 15 to 20 minutes of naptime if he could get their assistants to crowd around them as if they were watching them rehearse. The situation wasn’t that far off, anyway. Jeong Taeeul was supposed to be fast asleep. Lee Gon was supposed to watch her sleep. So what if in the script, she was supposed to have woken up almost right away? He could always say they were improvising on the…timing. Yes, that was it.

So he did what he could to give her what she needed. And when twenty minutes later, she woke up less disoriented and a little bit more rested, he decided it was all worth it. After all, they didn’t need that much practice to play a sleepy Jeong Taeeul and a Lee Gon who insisted that she sleep some more.

They got the scene perfect in two takes. So by the time they broke for late lunch, the only thing left for them to shoot together was the 12th episode’s closely guarded secret.

It is their fourth kiss.

They show up to the set in softer versions of Lee Gon and Jeong Taeeul. Gone are the dark long coats of Lee Gone with stiff collars that kept his neck perfectly regal, and cold. In its place is a pajama set in fiery shades of dark red— a vermillion cotton top with loose lounge pants in a mahogany so dark it looked almost black in a certain light. He wears a long robe the color of silken sangria only someone with his strong, sharp features could carry. In these clothes, Lee Minho still looks so royally handsome but much more earthy.

He walks around the four-poster bed, chewing on a piece of gum.

Kim Goeun sits on the right side of Lee Gon’s bed looking very much like she belonged there. Her slight figure in simple cornflower blue cotton pajamas, buttoned demurely up to her throat, rests delicately on top of luxurious royal blue brocade silk. The sea of blue on blue only serves to highlight how she is all smooth vanilla skin and cherry lips with eyes as dark and soft as the waves in her hair.

She fiddles with her script.

The director approaches them and sits on the edge of the bed to address them both. Lee Minho stops pacing and moves to stand on the side of the bed. Then the director holds up four fingers and says, “All in all, this entire kiss is made up of four parts— the beheading kiss, the warning kiss, the serious kiss, and the last kiss.”

He looks back and forth between Kim Goeun and Lee Minho, waves his hand from side to side, and tells them, “The only thing that’s set in stone is that the beheading kiss has to land on her neck, but in a very tasteful manner. So we are going for intimate, but tasteful. Everything else is up to the two of you.”

Then he asks them a question he already knows the answer to, “Do you think you can work it out between yourselves how to carry out the last three kisses?”

Lee Minho looks at Kim Goeun and at her hands that still fiddle with her script and he wonders if she still gets nervous about kissing scenes, their kissing scenes. He waits for a few seconds, trying to see if she can look him in the eyes. And when she doesn’t, he decides that yes, even Kim Goeun still gets nervous about kissing scenes. So he takes a page out of Lee Gon’s book and decides to annoy and amuse her all day. Because if she’s laughing at him, then isn’t worried about kissing him.

So he pats Kim Goeun’s shoulder and tells their director, “Of course! She likes telling me what to do when we kiss. We’ll manage.”

Kim Goeun’s eyes widen and she sputters, “What the— I didn’t! I never—“

Their director laughs as he recalls their first kiss from the 5th episode. He nods to himself and rubs his hands together, leaving the two of them to work their magic on a scene that needed to be as organic and natural as possible. All too often, kisses on television appear too staged and contrived, the passion they were showing becoming as manufactured as the romance they were selling. He wants this kiss to break the mold and the key to it was setting loose Kim Goeun and Lee Minho on each other.

“It’s just that it feels like I’m being kissed by a fish!” she yelps at him.

Lee Minho puts his hand over his heart in mock hurt and says, “Me, a fish? Just because I don’t close my eyes!?”

She nods slowly and patronizingly at him. “Yes, it’s very off putting,” she says, then wrinkles her nose at him.

He just shakes his head and laughs at her. Then he sits on the side of the bed with a flounce of his robe and says, “Alright, let’s do this. Four kisses, one non-negotiable and three negotiable.”

She leans back on the pillows, fingers tapping restlessly on the script. She stares at him intently, openly. He meets her gaze and holds it steadily.

“If the second kiss is a warning, it has to look and feel intimidating,” she begins.

“But tender,” he says as he slowly leans towards her. “Remember? Intimate and tasteful.”

His face inches even closer and asks, “How does this feel?”

She chews on her lip and assesses the centimeters of space between their noses, looking a little troubled because she felt too warm, too comfortable.

“Then I’ll drop my voice a few octaves lower while looking straight into your eyes.” He does it with his voice and his eyes as he says it and Kim Goeun feels the difference deep in her belly that she draws back from him in surprise.

An impressed grin curves her lips and his eyes gravitate towards them for a moment. He moves back into his space and once he does, he is able to look at her face and register her pleased look.

“That was really good,” she says with open admiration.

He waggles his eyebrows at her. “You may call me, Kiss Master.”

She rolls her eyes at him and she says snootily, “No. That was pre-kiss, not the actual kiss. I maintain that you still kiss like a fish.”

“No one has ever complained, you know!”

It was her turn to look smug. “They just couldn’t find a way to tell you, I’m sure of it.”

He heaves an exaggerated sigh and taps his script on the bed. “Anyway, let’s move on now. The third kiss is?”

“I think it was called the serious kiss?”

They made a face in distaste at the name at the same time. Having caught each other, they start snickering like two schoolchildren having a secret laugh behind their teacher’s back.

“Why is it called that?” she asks in a confused whisper.

“Probably because Taeeul tells Gon to stop being ridiculous? Other than that, I don’t have any idea what kissing in a serious manner means.”

“Let’s go through our lines and see where it brings us?”

He nods at her with a quick smile and positions himself properly on the bed. He marvels at how he approaches acting now with a mix of his calculated preparedness and her unique brand of creating something by instinct. He wonders if she has changed too, even just a little bit, and if she likes it.

She straightens up her spine and extends her neck as she begins with her line.

_Go ahead and try me._

He angles his head to the right and bops his head forward. He makes a honking noise, which he seems to think is the sound of a kiss, in place of an actual kiss on her neck. He catches a whiff of her floral shampoo as he draws back.

_Hey, do you want to die? Don’t—_

He cuts her off with another bop of his head along with a honk.

_I’m sure I told you that you could be beheaded for addressing me with “hey,” “this,” or “that.”_

She blinks rapidly to clear the fog in her head when she hears him use a voice from somewhere low on his belly. She thinks to herself that Jeong Taeeul is now in Corea and has witnessed firsthand the kind of wrath that Lee Gon was capable of. His warnings of beheading feel more real now.

So she gives him a deer caught in the headlights look and gulps as she backs away from him. But then she realizes that she is still Lt. Jeong Taeeul no matter where she is so she clears her throat and pushes her chin forward in a show of bravado.

_Stop being ridiculous._

He sees the defiant jut of her delicate chin but is drawn to the cherry of her lips. They are turned up to him, like the roundest, ripest fruits of offering for the gods. And he thinks that that’s how Jeong Taeeul makes Lee Gon feel sometimes— like a god who is tired of his warnings being dismissed by someone he only longs to protect. Someone he nearly lost.

He wonders if the instinct to swiftly cover her mouth with his to stop her from talking, is his or Lee Gon’s. So he stops himself.

“I think I need to kiss you thoroughly, and suddenly,” he says softly “because I think Lee Gon just realized he nearly lost Taeeul last night and here she is, asking for alcohol like it was just another day at the precinct.”

Kim Goeun chews on her lips while she nods at him approvingly. “That works for me. I was going for Taeeul pretending to be fine even though she feels a bit—”

_Unnerved by the low rumble of your voice_ , she nearly says but stops because that was her. So instead, she says, “shaken from her experience in the hands of Lee Lim’s men.”

“So that takes care of the third kiss.”

She looks up at him and asks, “What about the last one?” Then she says her line again and pretends to fall sideways into the bed to help him visualize what they should be doing.

He leans back to take stock of the headboard and pillows behind Kim Goeun, and the drapes on the four posts around Lee Gon’s bed, wondering how to best push her down and make it look like they had done more as the night wore on.

Kim Goeun likes to look at him when he looks like this. She thinks she can almost feel all the gears turning in his head and that they must look and work like a camera, zooming in and out, panning and tilting, and gauging things frame by frame. She wonders if he ever thinks about directing in the future.

“Lie back,” he says suddenly.

She looks at him blankly for a second. Then she feels his hands on her arm and shoulder gently pushing her back. She lets him but looks at him doubtfully as she rests on the pile of pillows behind her. The headboard isn’t high enough so when her back is fully pressed against it, her head falls back into empty space. She feels like she is being swallowed alive by the bed and the dread of it, and how ludicrous the thought is, shows on her face. Then she begins laughing at herself.

Her nervous laughter draws a smile from him and he tells her, “Don’t be scared!”

“I don’t think this is going to work!” she says in between laughs.

“Just slide down the bed when I push you back,” he says and motions with his hands what she could do to avoid falling into nothing.

“But you’re in the way! How am I supposed to slide down?”

“Use your legs! Give it a try, come on.”

He gets up from the bed to give her space to move but she just kept right on laughing and shaking her head.

“Do something before he hugs you,” their director calls out to her from a corner in the room.

She nods at him and tells him she will. Then she reaches out to grab Lee Minho’s arms, intending to show him how to push her down, but sideways onto the bed. His back is turned to her as he walks in circles beside the bed, just a little out of her reach. But by some design, she manages to catch his sleeve and he swerves abruptly just to be able to turn back to her.

“Why don’t we do it this way,” she says and falls back sideways onto the bed.

He points to the end foot of the bed and says, “The camera is going to be there later for a medium shot and over-the-shoulder angle. If we do that, the camera will see everything.”

“Exactly. Intimate, remember?”

“But intimate doesn’t mean they have to see everything. Right? That’s why I’m going for you falling backwards so I can hide you with my broad back.”

She looks pointedly at him. “Did you have to say that your back is broad?”

He preens for her as a joke. “Yes. And very manly.”

She fakes a sigh of annoyance and then gets back to the matter at hand. She says, “Explain it to me, though. How is covering me with your back intimate when being intimate means you’re near something enough to see the details better?”

“If we’re going for realism here and not drama standards, then as your man I don’t want anybody else seeing the expression on your face when I kiss you.”

She tries hard not to imagine what he just said and asks him, “And what about Lee Gon?”

That almost trips him but he rolls with it. “Lee Gon is Lee Minho,” he declares boldly. “He is probably me, multiplied ten times over. He is going to be fiercely protective, and private.”

“Okay, I get that. But how do we translate his protective and private nature and balance it with the intimacy that the audience needs onscreen?”

Silence stretches out between them. Their director looks at them back and forth, wondering which one would speak first. After a while, he steps in and tells them to prepare to do test shots of the two different methods.

Kim Goeun smiles triumphantly at Lee Minho. It wasn’t a win for her yet, but at least she had a chance to prove that her way was better.

Lee Minho sees her smile and feels the urge to make her smile even more. So he sticks out his hand to her and says, “Whoever wins gets the Kiss Master title?”

That earns him a great big look of disgust but it did give him a round of laughter and a smile with the little nose crinkle. It was enough for him.

She reaches out and shakes his hand anyway. “Deal!”

So the crew dims all the lights and except for one that they place above Kim Goeun. The camera crew, even the one for the BTS, moves to the foot of the bed for a medium shot.

The director calls out to start filming and Kim Goeun delivers her line, arches her neck in defiance once more, and Lee Minho swoops in with a too quick kiss on the base of her neck, near her left collarbone. She jumps away from him in practiced surprise, a confused look on her face.

He delivers his threat in that voice and those eyes and this time, she is much more prepared for it. She doesn’t melt and her line, “Hey, do you want to die? Don’t—“ has much more punch to it.

Then he kisses her like he said he would on the third kiss— thoroughly, suddenly. She is prepared for this and gives him her mouth to cover. She closes her eyes and fights the urge to open them just to check if he still kisses her with his eyes open.

And when she feels his lips slow down, she lets her eyes flutter open. Their lips part but remain only a few inches away from each other. For a few heartbeats, they just stare at each other.

And then, Lee Minho braces himself with his left hand and angles his head to the right to give the camera more access to her face before launching himself at her. He comes for her lips with an open mouthed kiss as he pushes her down to her side. With nothing on her right side to break her fall, she has a hard time keeping her lips pressed to his as she goes down.

So she chases after his lips as she falls.

Then she feels the familiar rumbling in his chest as he begins to laugh when they both tumble down gracelessly onto the bed. And because he knows the shot is ruined now, he does away with the kiss and just playfully digs his large, sharp nose into her soft, left cheek.

He remembers how she had given him permission to poke her cheeks with his nose way back in December. That was their first kiss. _Lee Gon’s and Jeong Taeeul’s_ , he adds to himself.

She erupts into a helpless fit of giggles the moment his nose starts nuzzling into her cheek while he has her pressed onto the bed. So she hits his shoulder to get him to stop.

He stops it immediately and climbs off of her. But he is still laughing and very proud of what he had done.

Dimly, they both hear their director belatedly yelling, “Cut!”

She rises from the bed, hair a bit mussed, still caught in a fit of giggles as she wipes her left cheek with the back of her hand. Several crew members and their assistants look sheepish and couldn’t quite meet her eyes. She knows how it must have looked to them but she could not stop laughing long enough to tell them that it was just his nose. Just his large nose!

So she just keeps on laughing.

Lee Minho looks at her triumphantly this time. She sighs heavenward but gracefully accepts that her method of falling sideways was a failure.

And when their laughter finally dies down, they fall back into their positions once more to try Lee Minho’s method of falling.

For this test shot, they maintain the medium shot and over-the-shoulder angle but move over to his right. The director signals the start of the shoot and once more Kim Goeun and Lee Minho breeze through the neck kiss and the kiss meant to silence Jeong Taeeul. She even breezes through the low and delicious rumble of his voice when he tells her that she could be beheaded for addressing him so informally.

Then comes the third kiss and by this time, she is so used to the force by which he kisses her so suddenly and so thoroughly that she feels it appropriate to add a little gasp of her own, just to change it up. His lips slow down as anticipated and they part, one breath away from each other.

They get into the habit of just looking into each other’s eyes for a few quiet moments.

Then she feels his hand cup the left side of her face. His touch is gentle, and warm, and so wonderfully familiar now that she has to fight off the urge to nuzzle deeper into his hand. His thumb grazing the corner of her lips make it even harder.

Still, her eyes are locked onto his.

However, her mind is on the headboard, on the uncomfortable feel of her head falling back into nothing, and on the difficult task of sliding down the bed using just her legs.

But when she feels the same warm hand on her cheek slide to the back of her head to gently cup her neck, all her thoughts about the logistics of kissing melt away. His hand is there and it is enough for her to allow herself to close her eyes as she receives his kiss, and lets her head fall back where it may.

But the director yells cut before she could even try to slide down the bed like he had told her to do. So they straighten themselves up after the kiss and turn to their director for further instruction.

“I know you want the element of the unknown as being more beautiful than what the audience can see,” says the director to Lee Minho, “but the audience can barely see anything from that angle. So I’m going to switch back to your left side and see if the camera can get more of Taeeul’s face this time.”

Kim Goeun’s face brightens up as she hisses at him, “See? Too much of your broad back on the frame means no intimacy!”

Lee Minho hisses back, “That’s why they’re switching to my left side! And my back is broad!”

She laughs at him and pushes at his shoulder to get him back into position so they can begin the scene.

“Do you think you can slide down this time?”

“I’ll try,” she tells him “but you have to get out of the way somehow. This bedcover is too heavy.”

“Want me to give you a push?”

“A what? No! What if the pillows smother me?”

“What is it with your fear of a bed murdering you? It won’t happen.”

She looks at him mutinously.

“I won’t let it happen,” he declares.

She remembers his hand sliding from her cheek to the back of her neck. She believes him. So she nods at him.

They begin rolling the moment the director gives the signal. Once more, they go through the four stages of the beheading kiss. Neck kiss. Warning kiss. Serious kiss. But then, an accident almost happens on the fourth and last kiss.

When he slides his hand to the back of her neck and pushes her back, he braces himself on his left hand and right knee and climbs on top of her to give her enough space to move down. Hidden from view, he pushes down on her shoulders; effectively sliding her down the bed and making it look like she was being ravaged thoroughly.

But then, they did not account for her bent knee suddenly coming up between his legs as she slid down. It hits him on his inner thigh, dangerously close to certain sensitive parts of him. They both freeze for a second, their eyes nearly bugging out of their sockets at the shared horror and embarrassment.

Their director yells, “Cut!” almost in a panic. Twice.

They know what they look like at a certain angle. But if they tell everyone that Kim Goeun had come extremely close to crushing Lee Minho’s balls with her knee, it would be even more embarrassing.

And so they do the one thing they had excelled at from the very beginning— they start giggling and it turns into a full on catch-your-breath kind of raucous laughter. They laugh and laugh until Lee Minho’s laugh suddenly catches in his throat as he realizes that the sight of a happy Kim Goeun looking up at him with her tousled hair spread out on a pillow, his pillow was all he could ever want. The knowledge knocks the wind out of him and suddenly, Lee Minho is breathless for a different reason.

They emerge from their disastrous kiss in a mess of tumbleweed hair, blooming cheeks, and uncontrollable mirth. Kim Gouen cannot stop laughing as she sits up and can only shake her head.

Lee Minho’s face is a mask of propriety as he sits back down and primly crosses his legs.

Kim Goeun laughs harder.

Their director wonders where the intense unresolved sexual tension from the fifth episode has gone to as he approaches them. “Listen here, you two. Here’s what we’ll do.”

He turns to Kim Goeun and tells her, “You will fall backwards on the last kiss but you don’t need to slide down. Remove one of the pillows behind you and you should have enough space to fall down without it looking awkward.”

“And you,” he turns to Lee Minho next with narrowed eyes, “I don’t want to hear about covering Taeeul’s face for Lee Gon’s privacy. We need a shot of Taeeul’s face. So I’m going to change the angle of the camera and just go for a plain medium close-up, taken from the right side of the bed so both your faces can be visible at an eye level angle.”

Then he addresses the two of them together. “Are my instructions clear? I have no problem with the delivery of your lines or your acting. They are both perfect. I just need less of this…” He waves his hand in their general direction and continues, “this thing. Whatever this thing is. I just need less of it. For the atmosphere.”

Kim Goeun and Lee Minho manage to look contrite and nod their assent. They are still smiling but at least they aren’t howling with laughter anymore. Satisfied that he had gotten his message across, the director goes back to his seat at the corner of the room and everyone prepares to take another shot.

Their eyes meet and an unspoken apology over having messed up passes between them. Then they both shake off the residue laughter to get back into their characters. But try as he might, Lee Minho could not get the image of a smiling Kim Goeun with her hair spread out all over his pillow out of his head.

So when she bares her neck for him and his lips linger half a heartbeat too long, it makes him wonder what would happen if he is allowed to linger even more, or trail his lips down the long line of her neck to the dip in her collarbone.

His blood roars in his ears and he could hardly hear what she says. So he cuts off her line too early and catches her lower lip with a kiss that came a few beats earlier than she expected. The kiss ends, but he doesn’t draw back like he should. He waits to see what she would do.

It takes her almost a second before she realizes that their lips are still only a hair’s breadth apart. She pulls back, unsure of this new step in a dance she thought they had already perfected.

So when he speaks to her in that voice from somewhere low on his belly, she is unprepared for it once more. The sound of his voice is turned to a little blue flame that she feels in her own belly. And because she sees his eyes but his eyes do not see hers because they are busy staring at her lips, she feels like every word he says is a kiss laid upon her lips.

She manages to tell him to stop being ridiculous like the script says she should. She still manages to gulp and clear her throat like they had rehearsed. She still manages to pull back.

But it seems that Lee Minho is done with her pulling back. It also seems like he is also done with holding himself back.

So when he kisses her again, he captures the back of her neck and makes sure she can’t pull back.

This, she has not learned to anticipate. So her hands come up between them and she thinks she means to push him away. But she finds that her hands do not want to do that at all. Her hands itch to spread themselves on his chest and feel the solid muscle beneath his shirt. They long to move up to shoulders and feel exactly broad they really are. They want to crawl up his neck and bury themselves in his thick dark hair and pull his head closer.

But she can’t. So Kim Goeun squeezes her hands that want too much into tiny unyielding fists as Lee Minho kisses her thoroughly while his hand kept her captive.

He has kissed her a total of twenty-one times now and for all those twenty-one kisses, Kim Goeun always, always closes her eyes. He envies her control, how she can lose herself in the kiss without losing herself. He fears he does not have that control. That’s why he never fully closes his eyes in any of his kissing scenes— to make sure that he doesn’t lose himself.

He ends the kiss regretfully. He can feel her eyes flutter open but his eyes stay on her soft, full, cherry red lips. Lips he has kissed twenty-one times. But never with his eyes closed. His thumb caresses her cheek and teases the corner of her lips.

And for the first time in his life, he wonders how it would feel to kiss Kim Goeun with his eyes closed.

It is this thought that undoes him.

So when he kisses her for the twenty-second time on this day in early May, he takes her lips into the warm cavern of his mouth as he imagines her hair spread out on his pillow, and then, he closes his eyes.

Later, after the director yells cut and beams at them proudly as he tells them it was a perfect take in one continuous reel, Lee Minho only feels hollow. He couldn’t quite meet Kim Goeun’s eyes as she tells him goodbye before leaving the set.

Lee Minho running hot and cold confuses Kim Goeun and it occupies her mind as she takes a long hot shower back in her room Ischia Hotel in Yongin City. They still have to film a couple of more scenes together tomorrow and it would be terribly uncomfortable if his emotions would still on a seesaw by then. She wonders if it was something she did but let the thought go quickly.

And as she steps out of the shower and wipes the fog off the mirror with her hand, she wishes it could all just go away.

Her cellphone ringing startles her and she quickly wraps herself in the fluffy white bathrobe from the hotel before looking for her cellphone. She finds it on the bedside table next to the hotel’s slate gray vintage telephone. And when she sees Woo Dohwan’s face on the caller ID, she plops down on the bed and answers it.

“Dowhanssi! Annyeong!”

“Noona!”

Kim Gouen giggles and is thankful for the welcome distraction of his chatter as he tells her about a new egg tart bakery he had found just across the street from his house. They had gotten so used to being in the same set for so long that whenever they found themselves in separate shooting locations, they often phoned one another just to chat.

“Ah…Noona, have you eaten dinner?”

She laughs at him and says, “Well, the question is have I eaten at all? You know I only eat at the end of the day after a shoot. I’ll probably just order some Jjajangmyeon in a bit.”

“Jjajangmyeon?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, got it.”

“What?”

“Ah, nothing! I have to go now, Noona! Good luck tonight! Tomorrow, I mean. Ah! Annyeong!”

“Annyeong Dohwanssi!”

Kim Goeun smiles fondly at Woo Dohwan’s quirks and thinks about what she could get for him when she gets back to Seoul. She would have to ask one of her assistants to find a bakery in Yongin that sells egg tarts.

She changes into her favorite large purple shirt and white sleep shorts with printed yellow bunnies. They are both worn and thin with overuse and that’s why she loves them all the more. Then she proceeds to dry her long hair in front of the mirror. She knows that with all the curling being done to it for Jeong Taeeul’s wavy hair, it will probably end up damaged by the end of the filming for The King. She is toying with the idea of getting it cut when someone knocks on her door.

On her way to the door, she checks the time and sees that it almost 10 in the evening. Her stomach grumbles and reminds her that she should call for take out after she deals with this one.

But it’s the smell of noodles with pork belly in blackbean sauce that assaults her senses when she opens the door. Her eyes close on instinct as she inhales the aroma gratefully.

“Jjajangmyeon special delivery for Kim Goeun.”

She thinks she’s gone crazy when she hears the low timbre of Lee Minho’s voice. But then she opens her eyes, sees Lee Minho standing on her door in plain black clothes and a baseball cap, and she realizes she has not ordered any Jjajangmyeon.

“May I come in?” he says hesitantly.

Kim Goeun snaps into action and lets him in before paparazzi or any of their staff catches them. She tries to usher him into her room but as soon as she closes the door and turns around, she finds him standing still in front of her, an unreadable expression on his face.

Lee Minho carefully places the takeout box on the wood and steel console table on the entryway. Then he removes his baseball cap and stuffs it into his back pocket. But as soon as his hands become empty, they start to shake. So he folds one hand into the other to hold them steady as he finally dares to meet her eyes.

“Listen, I won’t take much of your time. I know you’re already tired,” he begins shakily. But his dark eyes are sure and resolute. “But this important. I mean, it matters a lot to me that you know this.”

He takes a deep breath before he says, “I am so, so, very sorry for kissing you like that today on our shoot. I never lose control like that, never. But today, I did and I kissed you with my eyes closed and I felt so horrible after because it wasn’t right. I don’t treat female co-stars that way, as if they’re just someone I could freely steal kisses from. I respect you, I admire you, and I look up to you. And I hate that I did that to you. If I could just—“

The feel of her small hands gently opening his tightly wound fists interrupts his train of thought. She holds his hands on top of hers as she runs her thumbs soothingly over his knuckles. She wonders if his hands had always shaken like that. She pays too much attention to his right leg that she doesn’t really notice anything else. 

She wonders what else she has missed about him.

Then she wonders what he hasn’t missed about her.

“You closed your eyes?”

Her softly spoken question hits him hard and he swallows painfully. “Yes.”

“You said it didn’t feel right when you kissed me?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It was disrespectful. I didn’t treat you right as a professional actress when lord knows you, of all people, deserve that utmost respect. I didn’t—“

“Stop. That’s not what I’m asking.”

Her hands tighten around his and for the first time, he realizes that her own hands were shaking.

Kim Goeun looks up him, eyes bright and wide open, vulnerable.

“You said,” her voice hitches as she begins again, “you closed your eyes when you kissed me.”

He nods at her, suddenly unable to speak as his eyes desperately search her face for any sign of hope.

She closes her eyes, swallows the lump in her throat, and asks him in a whisper, “Was it real? When you kissed me?”

Lee Minho hears the roar of the ocean in his ears once more, just like that time Kim Goeun told him she loved him in Incheon and he pretended it was real.

Then he answers her question by taking both her hands and placing them on his chest, over his heart.

“Yes,” he answers and she feels his heartbeat leap beneath her palms. “Why do you ask?”

Her hands slide up his chest and up to his neck. She stops right beneath his jaw and that’s where her fingers rest when she tells him, “Because I wanted you to kiss me.”

She smiles up at him helplessly.

“And if I’m more honest with myself, I think I may have wanted you to kiss me for a long time now.”

Lee Minho’s hands are suddenly around her small waist as he hoists her effortlessly up onto the console table. She clutches at his back and her legs close around him. At this height, he could easily look into her eyes as he asks her, “Why did you want me to kiss you?”

One of his hands comes up to cup her cheek and for the first time, Kim Goeun can take this moment as hers, just hers. Not something she shared with Jeong Taeeul. So she does what she has always wanted to do as Kim Goeun everytime Lee Minho touched her cheek this way— she nuzzles deeper into his large warm hand. She commits the feel of his hand on her cheek to memory.

Then she lifts her head and bravely looks him in eye as she tells him of all the secrets she had been squirreling away in boxes inside her heart.

“I wanted you to kiss me because I know you spent half the day trying to distract me because you saw that I was nervous about the beheading scene. I wanted you to kiss me because you spent the other half of the day helping me steal naps because you saw that I barely had any sleep last night. I wanted you to kiss me because when we were in Busan and you had to put me back on my feet after carrying me, you always made sure I was steady on my feet before you let go.”

Kim Goeun feels like she’s in a wormhole, speeding through the past eight months in a blur. Her fingers clasp behind Lee Minho’s neck and play with the short hair on the back of his head, just delighting in the fact that she could, now.

“I wanted you to kiss me because you brought me coffee. You brought me jjajangmyeon. You brought me spicy chicken feet and jjampong. Because you knew I needed them even without me asking. And that’s it really. You see me. You take one look at me and you just know.“

They take a few moments to just stare at each other. Lee Minho’s hands are tight around her waist, as if keeping them there was the only thing that was keeping him under control. By contrast, Kim Goeun’s arms and hands are loose around Lee Minho’s shoulders. She feels lighter now, and braver, too. And she thinks it’s mostly because his arms are around her.

He is the first to break the silence.

“Euniga,” he says in his rumbling voice that starts a little blue flame in her belly “I’m going to kiss you now.”

The little blue flame burns hotter inside her and Kim Goeun feels like she’s going to melt right through. So she tightens her arms around his shoulders and hitches her legs higher around his waist.

Then one of his hands breaks away from her waist and climbs up to cup the back of her neck as he continues, “You can’t say something like that and expect me not to kiss you.”

His touches his forehead to hers and she closes her eyes as she feels the heat of his skin on hers.

“So I’m going to count to ten and kiss you.”

The hand on the back of her neck tightens and she feels him press a warm kiss on her forehead.

“And if you don’t want me to,” he whispers as his lips travel to her temple. She feels him press another kiss there.

“If you change your mind,” he continues as his lips descend on the delicate shell of her ear. His breath blows hot air into it and Kim Goeun trembles all over.

“You can change your mind. Just tell me,” he is speaking directly into her ear now in that low rolling timbre of his voice and she is grateful that she’s on the console table. “and I will stop.”

She wonders faintly if he ever knew—

“One,” he says, his lips catching the soft folds of her ear and sending shivers down to her toes.

She wonders if he ever found out—

“Two,” he breathes into her ear as his teeth takes her earlobe and gives it a little nip.

She is sure now that he knows that her ear is her weakest spot.

“Ten.”

He presses a kiss onto her ear before his lips finally claim hers in a searing kiss. His hands on her neck and waist pull her closer to him while her own hands tangle in his hair as she is left with no choice but to hold on to him. Attached to every touch of a hand on skin now is a memory of an almost touch. Almost held her hand. Almost touched his hair. Almost caught her fingers. Almost held on to his shoulders.

But the kiss, this kiss, is all new. None of the first twenty-two kisses mattered except for this one. And if tonight was the only night he was allowed to take this kiss, he was going to make this first and last one count, for now.

She feels him lift her from the console table and walk towards the bed while carrying her in his arms. When he reaches it, he sits down with her on his lap, straddling his legs.

For a while, they just stare at each other wondering at the difference one kiss made. He reaches for hers lips with his thumb, tracing her plump lower lip and marveling at how swollen they feel beneath his fingertip. His kiss had done that to her lips.

She touches his lips with her forefinger, fascinated by how beautiful they are. Inevitably, her gaze and wandering fingertip eventually land on his nose. A smile tugs on the corner of her lips and she gives in to the urge to kiss his nose.

He laughs and asks her, “How long have you wanted to do that, hm?”

She rolls her eyes at him and says, “Just now.”

“Liar,” he whispers as he pulls her close once more. He kisses away the protests he knows she was about to make and she lets him.

A thought suddenly occurs to her and she pulls away from him long enough to ask, “How long have you wanted to kiss me?

He pushes both of his hands into her hair and tilts her head so he could kiss the left side of her neck. His lips follow the curve of her neck as he whispers into her skin, “This should give you a clue.”

She lets the shiver pass down her spine before answering, “So, just today?”

“No.”

He gathers her hair with one hand as if it was tied in a ponytail and runs his thumb along her neck.

“Ah, episode four, in front of The Alley?”

Lee Minho tilts his head as he considers her answer. “Well, I do recall wanting to kiss you then but that wasn’t the first time.”

“So, when was it?”

He shakes his head and decides to give her another clue. He takes both of her hands and makes her hold her own hair up. Then he tilts her head a little bit to the right side, exposing left side of her neck.

“Ah! At Daegu Jungri Sports Park?”

He answers her by kissing her on left side of her neck like he had wanted to that day.

She lets go of her hair and frames his face with her hands. “But that was just in November,” she whispers in disbelief.

He nods at her and says, “That’s how long I’ve wanted to kiss you.”

Her only response, the only appropriate response really, is to kiss him thoroughly. She kisses him like it was still November and she was just discovering the shape of his lips. She kisses him like it was November compounded with all the months until May— all that hunger and longing into this kiss.

By the time her lips slow down, they are both breathless.

“I hope that makes up for all the times you couldn’t kiss me,” she tells him while sweetly rubbing the back of her fingers against his cheek.

“Oh believe me, you have a lot of making up to do after we’re done with film—“

“Stop.”

The panic in her voice makes him stop.

“Let’s not talk about the future,” she tells him haltingly. “All I know right now is that I’ve wanted to kiss you for a long time, and you just told me that you feel the same way. I don’t know what this means after we finish filming and I can’t ask you to make promises.”

“What if I want to make those promises?”

She draws away from him but he doesn’t let her.

“You’re not in a position to make promises,” she tells him. “We’re in the middle of a job. Said job comes with complications. And those complications are simply too big to deal with, even if you are Lee Minho.”

He thinks about telling her all that he has done, and is still trying to get done, just so they could get to a point in their lives when they can talk about their future. But as she says, they are still in the middle of a job.

Besides, wasn’t that also a part of a promise he made to her father— that he would not officially pursue her until after they had finished filming for The King? And technically, he still doesn’t have her father’s permission yet.

So he bites his lip so he can keep his word.

“Alright,” he acquiesces “so you mean to tell me that we’re just going to live for today and not think about anything else?”

Kim Goeun smiles at him as she recognizes her line. She thinks it’s funny how life imitates art in certain situations.

“As if today is the only day we’re allowed to be scandalous,” she finishes for him as she pushes him back playfully on the bed.

He takes her with him as he falls back and rolls, pinning her beneath him.

“Do you even know what scandalous means?”

Kim Goeun starts laughing uproariously and his heart stops and restarts. This was what had gotten him into trouble—the image of a laughing Kim Goeun beneath him with her hair spread out on a pillow. So he reluctantly gets off of her and moves up on the bed. He stretches his legs out and pats his lap. She clambers on top of the bed and curls up beside him like a contented cat with her head on his lap.

This, he thinks, is exactly how he wanted to spend his nights in the future. He couldn’t remember being this happy and contented in a long while. Except maybe for that day in Paju City.

“Are you trying to get me to sleep again?” she asks him and is a little embarrassed to feel a yawn coming on. She really must be getting older if she had Lee Minho on her bed and instead of kissing him senseless all night, she was actually considering sleep.

“Are you sleepy?” he asks her as he combs his hand through her hair.

“No,” she tries to say around a yawn.

“Don’t fall asleep yet,” he tells her.

“Wow, that’s new,” she says as she turns her head to look up at him. “You don’t want me to sleep?”

He boops her nose playfully and resumes combing through her hair with his hand. He debates with himself whether he should bring it up or not. He had already broken so many rules tonight so what was one more transgression?

“Yeah,” he says, treading carefully. “I kind of need your help with something. I really want to post this picture on Instagram. You’re in it, though. So I need your permission to post it.”

“Crop me out. You know how fans are.”

He feels her stiffen against him and he deliberately lets his pinky finger brush against the shell of her ear as he continues to comb through her hair with his fingers. Gradually, she begins to relax once more.

“I can’t crop you out.”

“Why not?”

“Your side has the view I want.”

“Well then I’ll crop you out and post it on my Instagram,” she giggles, obviously very impressed with her comeback.

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“My side has the reason why your side looks breathtaking.”

“Breathtaking? Who uses that word to describe a pic—“

“I do!” he cuts her off. “Come on, now. Can I post it?”

“Let me see the picture?”

He hands her his phone and is elated when he hears her soft gasp.

“This was in Paju City,” she states, her voice carrying as much wonder as he had felt when he first saw that picture. “You’re right. It is breathtaking.”

“It was a candid shot my manager took. He said that the sunset over the golden brown wheat field was too beautiful to pass up.”

“Is that why you want to post it? Because it's pretty?”

“No. Pretty things are pretty. But it’s more than that when it has the ability to make you happy simply by existing. I was really happy that day in Paju City.”

She smiles up at him and touches his chin to get his attention. She asks him, “Sunsets make you happy?”

He smiles down at her as he catches her hand and kisses her fingertips. “Yes,” he says.

“I like them, too.”

He wants to say, _I know. I remember every post on your Instagram account._ But he decides against it because it makes he sound a little too creepy.

_“_ I just don’t know if they’re happy things or sad things,” she says, a little pensive now after seeing their picture in Paju City.

“What do you mean?”

She wants to say, _Well you see, that day in Paju City I decided to stop fighting with myself and just allow myself to feel all the things you make me feel when you’re with me. But I don’t know if you feel the same. And even if you do, I don’t know if it’s real or just leftover feelings from Lee Gon. And once I start asking how real things are, I would want to know how long it will last.”_

But she decides against it because it sounds a lot like trouble. So she searches for something else to say instead.

“Have you ever read the book “The Little Prince”?”

“Nope. What is that about?”

“Well, there’s this little prince—“

“Wow. Couldn’t have guessed that,” he says dryly, teasing her.

She swats his shoulder. “Shut up and pay attention.”

He catches the hand that had swatted him a thousand times before and kisses the backs of her fingers.

“So the little prince is far away from home and he meets this pilot who’s stranded in the desert. So to pass the time, the prince tells the pilot about his home planet.”

“He’s an alien?!”

“Tsch! He’s a prince with golden curls! So anyway, his home planet is so small but he’s very happy there so doesn’t mind how small it is. You see, he loves sunsets and he could spend all day watching sunsets on his planet.”

“All day? How can it be sunset all day long?”

“It isn’t,” she says patiently. “But since the planet is so small, the little prince only has to move his chair a few paces and he can watch the sunset again. One time, he said he saw 44 sunsets in one day. That’s how much he loved it. Now here’s what confused me about it. He said that if you love sunsets, then you must be sad. I never really understood that.”

“It is a little confusing.”

“Right? I mean, why would he keep chasing after something that doesn’t make him happy? Unless it’s really just the chasing that makes him happy and not the sunset itself?”

“That’s ridiculous. You can’t catch sunsets anyway.”

She makes a disapproving sound at him and says, “You have absolutely now imagination whatsoever. I was talking figuratively. Never mind. My point is, he loved sunsets and he was happy, never sad. But the puzzle mystified so much as a kid that I ended up staring at sunsets all the time, just trying to figure it out.”

They were quiet for a bit.

And then he says, “So…is that a yes?”

“Huh?”

“To posting the picture? Because you told me you like sunsets and this is a picture of a sunset… So that’s a yes?”

She thinks about it and dreads all the nasty comments she is about to get. She thinks about all the trouble they could get into with that one post with his agency. And her own agency.

But then she thinks about The King ending in a month’s time and that one post of his could be her only reminder that at some point in time, she and Lee Minho had kissed each other senseless. And if today is the only day she will allow herself to be scandalous, she may as well go all the way.

“Yes. It’s a yes. Go and post it,” she tells him but what she really wants to say is, _I was really happy that day in Paju City, too. And it was because of you._ But she decides against it because he didn’t need to know that. It’s not like his life will change because of her happiness. So she keeps it to herself.

Lee Minho hands Kim Goeun his phone and tells her, “Go ahead. Press ‘Share.’”

She hovers her finger over the button and notices something.

“You’re not going to put borders on it?”

“Borders?”

“Yeah.”

“Nope. Why?”

“Nothing. Was just a question,” she tells him and then finally presses the ‘share’ button. Then she hands him his phone back.

Kim Goeun does not see Lee Minho’s sly smile as he fires off a text to his sister, informing her that the sunset picture from Paju is going to debut online, with Kim Goeun’s permission, in 12 hours.

With that done, he settles down for the night with Kim Goeun by his side. His hand returns to brushing through her hair and she sighs contentedly against his lap.

“You’re going to leave when I fall asleep, aren’t you?”

“I might have to, yeah.”

“I’m not going to sleep then.”

“Go to sleep,” he tells her as he smiles down at her, remembering this morning and how different things are now between them.

“No,” she murmurs, smiling sleepily against his lap.

Kim Goeun is not a creature of habit. Nighttime was to her, a gamble of sorts between restlessness and sleep. So when Lee Minho tells her to go to sleep, there was a 50/50 chance that her NO was a hard no. She could very well be a nocturnal creature.

Just not for this night. Curled up against Lee Minho, she falls deep into sleep, fast.

Meanwhile, Lee Minho is a creature of habit. Nighttime was to him, a time for eking out all the sleep he could get for the whole day. Needless to say, Lee Minho was not a nocturnal creature. So when he tells Kim Goeun to go to sleep, he thinks he can get some sleep after she does.

Just not for this night. Because for the second time that day, Lee Minho got to watch Kim Goeun fall asleep.


End file.
